Google’s fantastic virtual podcast tool just learned how to speak basically every language

NotebookLM's Audio Overviews can now explain complex topics no matter what you speak.

Apr 29, 2025 - 21:36
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Google’s fantastic virtual podcast tool just learned how to speak basically every language
  • Audio Overviews offer natural-sounding conversations between two virtual hosts on topics of your choice.
  • After debuting in NotebookLM, Audio Overviews have already spread to the Gemini app.
  • Now Google’s giving Audio Overviews a big accessibility boost, with support for output in over 50 languages.

Call us a broken record by now, but the Audio Overviews Google initially cooked up for NotebookLM may just be the coolest thing we’ve seen from the company’s AI efforts over the past couple years. A little over a month ago, Google helped introduce these same podcast-like audio summaries to an even larger audience by baking them in to Gemini itself. It’s already incredibly impressive how the system is able to break topics down and communicate them in an easy-to-grasp manner, and now Google’s got a big expansion to share that’s only going to make Audio Overviews even more accessible.

Being able to parse documents across a swath of languages is impressive enough, but Google’s doing us one better by giving Audio Overviews the ability to generate spoken output in more than 50 languages. Sometimes we’re used to seeing Google get a little piecemeal with adding new languages to systems like this, so it’s great to witness the company instead going all-in with a concerted effort like this — while there will always be edge cases, this should be sufficient to address the vast majority of user needs.