NotebookLM Audio Overview
A discussion of the blog post "NotebookLM goes global with Slides support and better ways to fact-check."
NotebookLM now lets you listen to a conversation about your sources
General summary
NotebookLM, a tool that helps users understand complex information by summarizing sources and providing relevant quotes, now offers an "Audio Overview" feature. With this new feature, users can listen to AI-generated discussions about their sources. These discussions summarize the material, make connections between topics, and can be downloaded for on-the-go listening. While Audio Overview is still experimental and has limitations, such as inaccuracies and the inability to interrupt the AI hosts, the team is excited to introduce this new way of understanding information.
Summaries were generated by Google AI. Generative AI is experimental.Bullet points
- NotebookLM now offers "Audio Overview," a feature that turns your documents into engaging audio discussions.
- Two AI hosts summarize your material, make connections, and banter, creating a lively "deep dive" conversation.
- Audio Overview can be downloaded and taken on the go, making it a convenient way to learn and remember information.
- It's important to remember that these discussions are not comprehensive or objective, but a reflection of the sources provided.
- The feature is still experimental and has limitations, such as taking several minutes to generate for large notebooks and inaccuracies in explanations.
Basic explainer
NotebookLM is a tool that helps you understand complex information.
Upload your sources and it will create an expert that can answer questions based on your material.
Now, you can listen to a conversation between two AI hosts discussing your sources.
This can be helpful if you learn better by listening to conversations.
Explore other styles:
We built NotebookLM to help you make sense of complex information. When you upload your sources, it instantly becomes an expert, grounding its responses in your material with citations and relevant quotes. And since it’s your notebook, your personal data is never used to train NotebookLM.
Over the summer, NotebookLM expanded globally and used Gemini 1.5’s multimodal capabilities to power new features, such as Google Slides and web URL support, better ways to fact-check, and the ability to instantly create study guides, briefing docs, and more.
Today, we're introducing Audio Overview, a new way to turn your documents into engaging audio discussions. With one click, two AI hosts start up a lively “deep dive” discussion based on your sources. They summarize your material, make connections between topics, and banter back and forth. You can even download the conversation and take it on the go.
It’s important to remember that these generated discussions are not a comprehensive or objective view of a topic, but simply a reflection of the sources that you’ve uploaded.
To try it out, follow these steps:
- Go to NotebookLM.
- Create a new notebook.
- Add at least one source.
- In your Notebook guide, click on the “Generate” button to create an Audio Overview.
Tired of reading? NotebookLM can now generate audio summaries of your sources.
Here’s our own Audio Overview1 that we generated when we used the latest Keyword blog post about NotebookLM as the source material.
Audio Overview is still experimental and has some known limitations. For example, for large notebooks, it can take several minutes to generate an Audio Overview. Also, when the AI hosts are explaining your sources today, they only speak English, sometimes introduce inaccuracies, and you can’t interrupt them yet.
We’re excited to bring audio into NotebookLM since we know some people learn and remember better by listening to conversations. Be sure to share your feedback so we can make Audio Overviews an even better way for understanding the information that matters most to you.
