Key Takeaways
- Google’s NotebookLM now offers Audio Overviews, allowing you to turn homework into interactive podcasts.
- The tool can generate spoken dialogue discussions from text input, documents, and even website links.
- Google cautions on limitations like processing time for large texts and English language limitation.
Google’s NotebookLM is a boon for students strapped for time. The tool essentially allows users to upload documents or plain text to NotebookLM, and have it answer detailed questions, surface key insights, or convert the complex material into simple-to-understand formats like FAQs.
During I/O back in May, Google announced that the tool will soon be supercharged with Gemini 1.5 Pro’s multimodal functionalities, unlocking features like Audio Overviews.
Albeit later than expected, Audio Overviews are finally landing on NotebookLM, as announced by Google in a new blog post today, allowing you to essentially turn your homework into an interactive podcast.
The feature, which can take all the information you feed it as input and create a spoken dialogue discussion from it, is a game changer for those that learn the best when they listen to information, rather than reading it. Users can download the conversation for on-the-go listening, and even jump-in the two-person AI conversation to put forward a point or ask for specific examples.
In a ‘live‘ presentation at I/O, which had ‘pre-generated‘ audio, the tech giant showed how the tool was able to generate a spoken-dialogue discussion about physics, with the presenter jumping in and asking for a “basketball example.” The tool was quickly able to connect basketball and physics, and explain how the former is a great tool to visualize force and motion.
Google has cautioned that the tool is still in its experimental phase, and has some known limitations. For reference, we added a 300-word text block to the tool, and it took roughly two minutes to generate an AI discussion around it. For larger pieces of texts or large vast documents, the tool can take several minutes. Additionally, the discussion is currently limited to English, and may introduce inaccuracies.
If you want to try out the tool regardless, you can head to notebooklm.google.com/ and tap on New Notebook or Add Source. Proceed by either uploading a document, a link to a website, or paste in text and tap on Generate. Alternatively, you can follow the screenshots above for visual cues.
If you don’t want to go through the hassle of testing out the feature, check out this Audio Overview below. It summarizes a recent Android Police article about Pixel 9 Pro Fold owners facing 5G issues on AT&T.
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