Turn notes into a podcast: a real example from a shell lesson

Lesson notes from a Software Carpentry shell course became a two-host podcast for beginners. Hear it, copy the request, see its cost and our check.

How this was made. Audio and video overviews, slide decks and infographics are made with Google's Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), on accounts that AutoContent operates. AutoContent has no agreement with Google. Google can limit or stop this access at any time.

The podcast19 min 41 s

AI-generated with AutoContent APIDownload MP3 Full transcript (TXT)

Format: Podcast
Job: Course lessons
Language: English
Length: 19 min 41 s
Credits used: 10 credits
Cost on the Starter plan: €0.29
Generation time: 8 min 36 s
Generated on: 2026-11-02

Make this with the API

This output used 10 credits, which is €0.29 on the Starter plan (€29 per month for 1,000 credits). Failed generations use none. Generation time runs from the request to the finished file; it depends on the sources, the options and the queue.

Source and license

The Unix Shell: Navigating Files and Directories, Software Carpentry (The Carpentries). License: CC BY 4.0.

Derived from "Navigating Files and Directories", part of the Software Carpentry lesson "The Unix Shell". Copyright (c) The Carpentries (https://carpentries.org/), licensed under CC BY 4.0. Changes: the lesson was turned into an AI-generated podcast.

What came out, and what we would change

The notes are one lesson page of the Software Carpentry shell course, sent as a link; lecture notes, a handout or a textbook section work the same way. We asked for a lesson for complete beginners: an example for each command, the mistakes to avoid, and a short recap. We left duration at default. The result is a two-host episode of 19 min 41 s. It opens with the movie picture of a hacker at a black screen, walks through pwd, ls and cd, and ends with the recap we asked for.

The facts match the lesson. Every command, option and error message in the episode is in the source: ls -F, -s and -S, -l with -h, -t with -r, the error for ls-F without a space, the error for an unsupported option, relative and absolute paths, .., ~ and cd -, tab completion, --help, man and help cd, and clear -x. The hosts also keep the lesson's story about Nelle, her 1,520 data files and the north-pacific-gyre folder.

The hosts add their own pictures: a hotel, a pantry and GPS coordinates. They are not in the lesson, but they make relative and absolute paths easy to follow. As asked, nobody names the lesson's authors. The transcript spells some names by ear, for example Nell for Nelle.

Length is the thing to change. The API docs describe default as 8 to 12 minutes; this episode is well above that range. For a shorter lesson, set duration to short: in our runs, short gave 4 to 7 minutes in English and Spanish, but it did not shorten two Brazilian Portuguese episodes (17 and 28 minutes). Generation took 8 min 36 s. The episode used 10 credits, the same as a short one, because a podcast costs 10 credits at any length. For a full course, send one request per lesson and add podcastId to put every episode in the same show feed.

Guide for this job: Turn a course into a learning podcast.

Transcript excerpt

Speech-to-text of the output, not edited and without speaker labels. It is part of the sample output.

Ah, so this brings us to the grammar of the shell. The grammar. Yeah. A shell command is usually made up of three parts. The command, the option, and the argument. Okay. Command, option, argument. Right. So you use the command ls. We can add an option to modify how that command behaves. How does that look? For example, typing ls, a space, and then a capital F. Capital F. Yes. This tells the list command to classify the output. It actually adds a little marker to the end of each name.
Oh, that's handy. Yeah. If something is a directory, it puts a forward slash at the end of the name. If it's an executable program, it puts a little star. Oh, I see. So seeing desktop instantly tells me it's a directory, a door I can walk through. Exactly. Now, looking at the source material, there are a lot of these options, and some of them look really similar but seem to do completely different things. Oh, yeah. Like I'm looking at the lowercase s and the uppercase s. And capitalization absolutely matters in the shell.

The exact request

The body that was sent to POST /content/Create, unchanged, and the same request as curl.

request.json

{
  "resources": [
    {
      "type": "website",
      "content": "https://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/02-filedir.html"
    }
  ],
  "outputType": "audio",
  "text": "Teach this lesson to beginners who have never used a terminal. Explain each command with a concrete example, say what can go wrong, and end with a short recap of the commands. Do not mention the lesson's authors.",
  "duration": "default",
  "language": "English"
}

curl

curl -X POST "https://api.autocontentapi.com/content/Create" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AUTOCONTENT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"resources":[{"type":"website","content":"https://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/02-filedir.html"}],"outputType":"audio","text":"Teach this lesson to beginners who have never used a terminal. Explain each command with a concrete example, say what can go wrong, and end with a short recap of the commands. Do not mention the lesson'\''s authors.","duration":"default","language":"English"}'
# then poll until "status" is 100:
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $AUTOCONTENT_API_KEY" "https://api.autocontentapi.com/content/Status/<request_id>"

How we checked it

Transcript: We transcribed the output with Whisper large-v3-turbo and compared the transcript with the source.
Language: Detected en, requested en.
Loudness: -24.2 LUFS integrated, true peak -5.2 dBTP.
Notes: Every command, option and error message matches the lesson; the hotel, pantry and GPS pictures are the hosts' own. The episode is longer than the docs' range for "default".
Checked on: 2026-11-02. Failed generations are run again and never published.

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