Would you rather read your memos or have someone read them back to you? Well, Google is now making the latter an option, with the new AI-powered feature dropping in NotebookLM's latest update.
As per Google's press release, the Alphabet company says it created NotebookLM, its Gemini 1.5 Pro powered research assistant, to help consumers "make sense of complex information", with a recent expansion allowing support for Google Slides, better fact checking, instantaneous study guide creation and more. But now, Audio Overviews will "turn your documents into engaging audio discussions" by using two "AI hosts".
After uploading a new or existing Notebook, users can click on the "Generate" button to create an Audio Overview, where the hosts will start a deep dive discussion based on the document's sources, summarizing material and offering back-and-forth banter about related topics. Users can even download the audio and listen on the go, much like a podcast.
To demonstrate how to use the feature, Google created an eight-minute-long audio clip, which dabbles with the two AI-generated voices mimicking that of typical podcast banter, with conversational colloquialisms thrown into the mix alongside factual information (I dare you to count how many times the word "like" is used).
That said, Google notes that the generated discussions are "not a comprehensive or objective view of a topic, but simply a reflection of the sources you've uploaded". In simple terms, this feature pulls directly from the input material, so user potential is endless. However, there are some caveats to the feature, in that it's still described as "experimental" and the hosts only speak English.
Another limitation would include the fact that users cannot interrupt or pause the hosts yet. While we're not sure what that would entail, we can speculate that once the user has inputted their sources or notes and enabled the feature, changing the "script" for the AI hosts could prove challenging. Google says that the hosts can "introduce some inaccuracies" too, so we'd suggest taking that with a grain of salt, especially if students frequently access the feature.
We're unsure if these AI hosts will venture beyond NotebookLM, but Google hasn't limited real-time AI conversation capability, with Gemini's recent rollout of its Live Voice Mode for Android users.
