Google Labs has a long history of inviting users to experiment with cutting-edge tech. Gmail was once a private beta project. Illuminate is a project that turns academic papers into AI-generated audio discussions in the style of an NPR podcast. The idea is simple: Google's LLM Gemini generates a paper summary and a Q&A. Two AI-generated voices, a male interviewer and a female expert, will guide you through a short interview describing the paper. You can listen to some of the samples on the Google Illuminate website. This is useful, letting me listen to engaging summaries of the ever-growing stack of research papers I must read as I exercise or drive. It can also be easily adapted to other narration forms for different use cases. Illuminate is in private beta, and you can join the waitlist here.