I ran one of my papers into it, mind blown how well they dumbed it down without losing too much details (still quite a lot was ommitted). I wonder if it's domain specific, and I wonder what's the variance by topic.
Same here. In fact, I typically struggle communicating my scientific research to journalists, and next time I'll use this. It found some good metaphors to make even a quite math-heavy paper's core concepts understandable to the audience without losing correctness, which is something that both I and the journalist typically fail to do (I keep the correctness but don't make it understandable enough, so then journalists start coming up with metaphors and do the opposite).
A lawyer friend of mine also suggested giving it the Spanish civil code, a long, arid legal text. The podcast of course didn't cover the whole text in 10 minutes, which would be impossible, but they selected some interesting tidbits and actually had me hooked until the end and made me learn a few things about it, which is no small merit. And my friend was quite impressed and didn't complain about correctness.
I did the same thing, running one book I edited and another book I wrote through it, and it did quite well. I was particularly impressed with how the “hosts” came up with their own succinct examples and metaphors to explain what I had written at much greater length. (I should mention that one of those books was in Japanese, and they captured it clearly in English.)
Lately, when I just want to get the gist of a long article or research paper, I run it through NotebookLM and listen to the podcast while I’m exercising.
My only complaint is that the chatty podcasty gab gets tiring after a while. I wish it were possible to dial that down.
