A shell lesson in English turned into a Spanish podcast

An English shell lesson became a Spanish podcast for beginners. Hear it, copy the exact request, and see its cost and our check against the lesson.

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 podcast (Spanish)6 min 13 s

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

Format: Podcast
Job: Course lessons
Language: Spanish
Length: 6 min 13 s
Credits used: 10 credits
Cost on the Starter plan: €0.29
Generation time: 5 min 49 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: Working With Files and Directories, Software Carpentry (The Carpentries). License: CC BY 4.0.

Derived from "Working With 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 English lesson was turned into an AI-generated podcast in Spanish.

What came out, and what we would change

The source is in English. The request sets language to español and asks to keep the command names in English. The episode is in the Spanish of Spain, with words such as ordenador and vale, and it keeps mkdir, touch, mv, cp and rm as they are. For Latin American Spanish, use español (Latinoamérica) or español (México).

The steps follow the lesson: make a thesis folder, create an empty file with touch, rename it with mv, copy it with cp, and delete it with rm, with the warning that the shell has no recycle bin. It ends with the risk of rm and the * wildcard in the wrong folder.

The hosts add explanations that are not in the lesson: that mv only changes where the name points, and that cp writes every byte again. That is true for a move inside one disk, but not for a move to another disk, and some file systems copy a file without writing its bytes again. They also say that deleted bytes stay on the disk only "por un brevísimo tiempo" and can be overwritten "en milisegundos"; the lesson only says that the computer may reuse the space right away. In the transcript, some commands run into the file name, for example touchmyfile.txt.

The episode runs 6 min 13 s, took 5 min 49 s to generate and used 10 credits. Credits depend on the output type, not on the language, so the English version of the same request costs the same.

Transcript excerpt

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

Madre mía. Cuando se ejecuta RM, el borrado es definitivo y fulminante. Espera, espera. Seguro que no hay un índice oculto o algún proceso que retenga los datos temporalmente por si ocurre un accidente. Siempre hay una red de seguridad, ¿no? ¿Qué va? ¿Qué va? En absoluto. Y el mecanismo es tan brillante como implacable. El comando RM significa remove, pero lo que realmente hace a nivel de sistema es desvincular. Ah, vale. Rompe el enlace. Destruye la dirección que apuntaba a los datos. Los bytes físicos siguen en el disco por un brevísimo tiempo, pero el sistema marca ese espacio como vacío y disponible.

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/03-create.html"
    }
  ],
  "outputType": "audio",
  "text": "Teach this lesson to Spanish-speaking beginners: how to create, move, copy and delete files and folders from the terminal, with one example for each command and a warning about deleting files. Keep the command names in English. Do not mention the lesson's authors.",
  "duration": "short",
  "language": "español"
}

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/03-create.html"}],"outputType":"audio","text":"Teach this lesson to Spanish-speaking beginners: how to create, move, copy and delete files and folders from the terminal, with one example for each command and a warning about deleting files. Keep the command names in English. Do not mention the lesson'\''s authors.","duration":"short","language":"español"}'
# 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 es, requested es.
Loudness: -24.1 LUFS integrated, true peak -5.2 dBTP.
Notes: The commands and the deletion warning match the lesson. The explanations of how mv and cp work inside the file system are the hosts' own.
Checked on: 2026-11-02. Failed generations are run again and never published.

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