I have a confession to make: I’m a coffee nerd. But if you know me, you probably already knew this 😉.
I’m always buying fresh beans from local coffee shops or somewhere online. I’m using a hand grinder to grind the beans, and my favourite brew method is the Aeropress.
When a bag of beans is empty, I’m not throwing them away, but I keep them, and when the year is over, I’m creating an overview: My Year In Coffee.
I’m not the only one who’s doing this; there are a lot of coffee nerds that are doing this, e.g., pullandpourcoffee (Instagram).
Google Sheets to Podcast
I’m using Google Sheets to collect the data and generate some graphs about the data: the origin of the beans, the way they are processed, where I bought them, etc.
I started in 2019, so I have six years of data in a Google Sheet, and I thought maybe I could use AI to get some insights about these six years.
Google NotebookML is a Google AI tool where you can add your own data sources and ask ChatGPT-like questions about your data. The problem is that it doesn’t support Google Sheets, but it does support Google Docs, so I copied all data from the Google Sheet into a Google Doc. If you copy data from a Google Sheet and paste it into a Google Doc, you can add this document to NotebookML.
Another option is to export the Google Sheet to PDF and upload this to NotebookML.
After asking some questions about the data, I realized NotebookML also has the option to generate a podcast about the data. A few minutes after I clicked on the generate button, the podcast was ready.
In a 12-minute conversation about the data I’ve collected in the last six years, it is fascinating to hear two “people” talk about this.
They talk like they know what they’re talking about, with some background information about the countries, regions, and processing types of the beans. They even noticed I hadn’t tasted much coffee from Indonesia!
Okay, there are some issues. The audio isn’t always perfect; they mention that I’ve included tasting notes in the data, which I haven’t, they are repeating themselves, etc., but overall, I love it!
Listen for yourself.
If you have tips about what coffee I should try in 2025, or if you are a coffee roaster who would like to be included in next year’s overview, just send me an e-mail 😉.