Remixing your memories
Revisiting your favorite moments in a different way
👋 Hi friends, it's Hesam with issue #35 of 4 bits. 4 bits is a biweekly newsletter where I share thoughts and musings on how to build memorable experiences.
What I’ve been up to lately:
🤖 Building more chatbots for courses at Rice. You’d be surprised how easy bots are to create using drag and drop tools.
💪 These bots amplify your work on discrete tasks. One of the bots, Disco Write 1000, gives you feedback on an essay before you publish online. Another, Disco Path 1000, discovers future startup and job opportunities based on information you provide: your favorite industries, favorite open ended questions you have (“How can I get better at designing experiences?”), and the results of a personality test.
🪩 Why do the bot names start with Disco? Because they are for a course called Disco, of course.
💬 In the background, the bots are communicating with OpenAI, using similar capabilities to ChatGPT, to provide personalized recommendations.
✨ We’ve deployed these bots in our courses, usually during a class session, where we’re able to troubleshoot live and see people’s responses to the bot recommendations. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive (“I never knew these opportunities existed!”). We’re looking for more ways to sneak in small tools like this in the future.
Many memories, all forgotten
Our physical and digital lives are cluttered with memories. Everywhere you look, you see something from the past.
Photos from trips. Notes to yourself. Messages with others.
Most of us never do anything with those memories. They sit somewhere until we stumble across them again, either while tidying up a space or while in search of something else.
They’re on your phone, in a shoe box in a closet, or lost somewhere in a stack of papers yet to be discovered.
How could we surface some of those memories, make them more accessible, and experience them in a different way?
A couple of summers ago, my family and I started an annual tradition of traveling overseas. We didn’t know what to expect — it was our first time traveling as a bigger family together.
In the spirit of capturing memories, we created a pop up email newsletter1, where friends and family could subscribe to follow our adventures. A series of emails, scattered across the trip, chronicling everything from my son’s first encounter seeing someone smoke a cigarette (“what’s that thing she’s putting in her mouth? why would she do that?”) to packing lists inspired by hostage negotiations (or how to convince people to pack as minimal as possible).
Our second summer, we did a pop up newsletter again (season 2!).
By the end of these two seasons, we had a collection of stories. But they were hidden among thousands of other emails in inboxes, possibly never to be seen again.
Remixing memories
What if you could turn these emails into a podcast?
Enter NotebookLM. A note taking and research tool released by Google, NotebookLM allows you to add documents, websites, YouTube videos, pdfs, and other materials as sources to process. NotebookLM then generates a study guide for you. You can ask it questions about the materials.
NotebookLM is designed for people who are doing research or studying for courses, but there are endless ways to use it.
As an additional feature, NotebookLM offers audio overviews, generating a podcast with two AI voices talking about the materials in a free flowing conversation.
Curious to see how it worked, the other day I uploaded all of the emails from the two seasons of our pop up newsletter. Within minutes, NotebookLM generated a 13 minute podcast and a summary:
A Table for Five is an email series where a family of five shares their experiences during a summer trip overseas. The series covers the highs and lows of their trip including: packing for their journey, using AirTags to track their children, experiencing cultural differences, visiting a Dutch F1 racing track, exploring a historic windmill, trying French butter, and attending a Swiss wedding. The final installment reflects on their experience and highlights the challenges and joys of traveling as a large family. The series is filled with humor, family photos, and reader feedback, offering a personal and relatable glimpse into the adventures of a family traveling with young children.
At dinner that night, I stealthily started playing the podcast. As we sat there eating, story after story from our trips emerged, in a conversation with two (imaginary?) strangers. The strangers were even mentioning the names of our children when referencing specific stories, which resulted in some giggling at the dinner table.
The podcast hosts weren’t just repeating what was said in the newsletter. They were attempting to synthesize and make sense of it all in their own way, just as humans would. They even made jokes. It was eerie.
By turning the emails into a podcast, the buried email series had turned into an audio story that could be enjoyed in other contexts than written words: while on the go or playing in the background. The imaginary podcast hosts added their own spin and perspective. They’re telling the story of your memories to you in a new medium, with little to no effort on your end.
I leave you with NotebookLM’s generated podcast of all the previous 4 bits issues. 34 issues of essays transformed into a 12 minute conversation.
If you have a Google account, you can try NotebookLM for free too.
What memories do you have sitting around, waiting to be remixed?
What’s a pop up newsletter? It’s time boxed, seasonal, and unlike a traditional newsletter, meant to end at some point.
That podcast was insane to listen to!!!
I need Disco Write. And now I want to try out the podcast too. So much to delve into here, Hesam!