Audio Overviews bring one of Google’s most impressive AI tools to Gemini
You may not have given NotebookLM a chance, but now you've got no excuse.
- Google introduced Audio Overviews with NotebookLM in 2024.
- The tool automatically generates podcast-like recordings of virtual hosts discussing the documents of your choice.
- Now you can generate the same kind of Audio Overviews straight from Gemini.
Of all the neat tricks that modern AI is capable of, one of its most useful, and arguably least controversial, has been its ability to concisely summarize documents: taking one big pile of text, and shrinking it down into a much more manageable parcel. And while that’s cool enough with the written word, last year we saw Google really step up to take things to the next level, introducing NotebookLM, a tool for generating podcast-like audio summaries. For as powerful as it can be, though, not enough people use NotebookLM — which is one of the reasons we’re very excited to learn that Google is now bringing NotebookLM-style Audio Overviews to Gemini itself.
Today Google’s announcing Canvas for Gemini, a new set of tools revolving around documents and your ability to collaboratively edit them with Gemini. So perhaps with documents in the spotlight, it’s only appropriate that we’re also learning about this Audio Overviews expansion.
