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NotebookLM's Audio Overview Turns Your Documents into Engaging Talks

NotebookLM's Audio Overview Turns Your Documents into Engaging Talks

Alicia Shapiro
September 12, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

A sleek user interface showcasing NotebookLM's Audio Overview feature in action. Two AI avatars are seen conversing, summarizing a complex document on the screen, with a progress bar indicating the audio discussion. The background highlights icons representing documents, slides, and charts, symbolizing the various file types that can be converted into discussions. The overall aesthetic is modern, featuring soft gradients and vibrant digital elements.

Image Source: ChatGPT-4o

NotebookLM's Audio Overview Turns Your Documents into Engaging Talks

NotebookLM is designed to help users make sense of complex information. Now, with the introduction of the new Audio Overview feature, you can turn your documents, slides, charts, and more into engaging audio discussions. With just one click, two AI hosts dive into a lively conversation based on your sources, summarizing the content, connecting topics, and even providing a bit of banter. You can also download the conversation and listen on the go.

How NotebookLM Makes Sense of Your Sources

When you upload your sources to NotebookLM, the system instantly becomes an expert, grounding its responses in your material with citations and relevant quotes. It's important to note that NotebookLM never uses your personal data to train its system. Over the summer, NotebookLM expanded globally, incorporating the multimodal capabilities of Gemini 1.5 to power new features like Google Slides and web URL support. It also introduced better ways to fact-check and instantly create study guides, briefing documents, and more.

Screenshot of the NotebookLM interface featuring an Audio Overview in progress for a document titled 'Science in Motion.' The interface shows options to create a table of contents, study guide, FAQ, briefing document, or timeline. A summary of the document’s contents is visible on the left, with an audio progress bar on the right, and sample questions like 'How do Newton's three laws of motion explain how objects move and interact?' displayed below

Tired of reading? NotebookLM can now generate audio summaries of your sources. Image Source: Google Blog Post

How to Try the Audio Overview Feature

Getting started with Audio Overview is simple. Here’s how you can try it out:

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.

As a demonstration, NotebookLM generated an Audio Overview using the latest Keyword blog post about its own features. You can hear it on their blog post.

Limitations and Next Steps for Audio Overview

As with any experimental feature, Audio Overview has some limitations. For large notebooks, it may take several minutes to generate the discussion. Currently, the AI hosts only speak English, and there may be occasional inaccuracies. Unfortunately, you can’t interrupt them yet during the discussion, but improvements are on the way.

Why Audio?

NotebookLM’s team is excited to introduce audio capabilities because many people learn and retain information better by listening. While Audio Overview is still in its early stages, user feedback will play a key role in improving the feature to help users better understand their sources.