Google’s NotebookLM Audio Overviews will now let you call in with a question

Google has made a big splash with its AI-generated podcast feature, and before the year is out, the app is now available. . As part of a broader redesign of Google’s AI notebook tool, audio overviews are now interactive.

After generating an audio overview based on the sources you’ve uploaded, Google says you’ll be able to play the recording in a new “interactive mode (BETA).” When you click “Join” at any point on that new playback screen, the AI ​​hosts will call you with a question, which they will answer live while you listen. Google warns that the feature is still experimental and that hosts might make awkward pauses or introduce new inaccuracies when answering questions, but it seemed to work well in a brief test. I was able to create a NotebookLM project trained on articles on NotebookLM, and although asking a question seemed to slow down the entire overview, the AI ​​presenters were able to seamlessly incorporate an answer into the rest of the program.

In addition to these new expanded features, NotebookLM is receiving a small visual overhaul. The interface is now divided into three sections: a “Study” panel where you can find AI-generated content such as audio summaries, study guides and FAQs, a central “Chat” panel to ask questions about your sources to the Google AI and a “Sources” panel. ”Panel on the left to manage the sources that NotebookLM pulls from. It’s a pretty neat setup and being able to collapse a panel when you’re not using it keeps things from getting cluttered.

Google is also using these updates as a way to introduce its first attempt at monetizing NotebookLM. a new The premium subscription is available to Google Workspace and Cloud customers as an add-on to Gemini and will give you the ability to generate up to 20 audio summaries per day, create up to 500 AI notebooks, and add up to 300 sources per notebook. That translates to an extra $20 per user per month for Workspace subscribers. Starting next year, NotebookLM Plus benefits will also be included in the Google One AI Premium subscription.

NotebookLM started out as an internal Google experiment called Project Tailwind, but it quickly became one of the more reasonable applications of Google’s Gemini AI model thanks to its reliance on sources you upload, rather than the web and any scraped material. which Gemini originally trained. It’s capable of working with anything from web articles to multimedia files, but its audio overviews have proven to be one of its most popular features.