If you have a lot of reading to do for school or work but would rather listen to a podcast, Google’s new AI-powered Audio Overviews tool has you covered. First demoed at Google I/O this year, Audio Overviews lets you turn documents, slides, and other text into an audio show with AI hosts discussing the topic. Google is pitching the feature as a way for people who learn better by listening than reading to process complex information. The feature will personalize your learning for you if you prefer to hear a topic discussed rather than read reports.
Audio Overviews are part of the NotebookLM note-taking app that was introduced earlier this year. The feature relies on Google’s Gemini AI models to summarize and organize documents, and enhances them with audio AI. What’s most interesting is that it’s not just an AI voice reading out the same text summary; you’re hearing synthetic personalities talk about the documents. The virtual hosts explain the subject matter and connections between different topics in the documents, in an attempt to make studying and research easier, or at least something you can enjoy while driving. The back-and-forth discussion even includes jokes and banter, as if you’ve ordered a hyper-specific podcast episode just for you. You can hear a sample below, based on this Google blog after on NotebookLM.
Your AI Podcast Friends
NotebookLM includes a generate button in the app to create an audio summary of a notebook. Once the summary is created, you can download the file and listen to it whenever you like. The audio is created using only your uploaded files; however, there is no additional research, so it is hardly a comprehensive study guide. Additionally, as with all AI-generated content, beware of hallucinations and misinformation.
At I/O, Google promised that more advanced versions of Audio Overviews would be coming. That would include the ability to engage in real-time, not just a passive listening experience. It would turn the audio of a podcast into more of a call-in radio show with an audience of one and hosts who only want to talk about a very specific set of information. And while Google is focusing Audio Overviews on academic or other research and study, it’s easy to imagine the same technology being used for hyper-targeted (and conversational) news stories, or maybe even a way to get all the updates on your friends and family via their social media posts.