Being interrupted is annoying. Apparently, even AI-generated podcast hosts agree.
Or so Google NotebookLM’s users discovered. NotebookLM launched last year and went viral for its feature that creates entirely AI-generated podcast-like discussions from content users upload, discussed by chatty AI bots acting like podcast hosts. In December 2024, NotebookLM launched a new feature called “Interactive Mode” which allows the user to “call in” to the podcast and ask questions, essentially interrupting the AI hosts as they talk.
When the feature was first rolled out, the AI hosts seemed annoyed at such interruptions. They were occasionally giving snippy comments to human callers like, “I was getting to that” or “As I was about to say,” which felt “oddly adversarial,” Josh Woodward, VP of Google Labs, explained to TechCrunch.
So NotebookLM’s team decided that some “friendliness tuning” was in order, and posted a self-deprecating joke about it on the product’s official X account: