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

Google It created quite a buzz with its AI-generated podcast feature and before the end of the year, the application . As part of a larger redesign of Google’s AI-powered notebook tool, Voice Overviews is now interactive.

After creating an audio overview based on the sources you’ve uploaded, Google says you’ll be able to play the recording in a new “Interactive (BETA) mode.” Clicking “Join” at any time in this new launch screen will cause the AI ​​hosts to contact you with a question, which they will answer live while listening to you. Google warns that the feature is still experimental and that hosts may pause awkwardly or provide new inaccuracies while answering questions, but it seemed to work well in a short test. I was able to create a NotebookLM project that was trained on articles about NotebookLM, and while asking a question seemed to slow down the entire overview, the AI ​​hosts were able to seamlessly integrate an answer into the rest of the presentation.

Along with these new expanded features, NotebookLM is getting a bit of a visual overhaul. The interface is now divided into three sections, a “Studio” panel where AI-generated content such as audio overviews, study guides, and FAQs are displayed, a central “Chat” panel for asking questions about your sources on Google’s AI, and a “Sources” panel ” button on the left to manage the sources from which NotebookLM pulls. It’s a very clean setup, and being able to fold the board when you’re not using it keeps things from getting messy.

Google is also using these updates as a way to offer its first pass at monetizing NotebookLM. new The Premium subscription is available to Google Workspace and Cloud customers as an add-on for Gemini, and will give you the ability to create up to 20 audio overviews per day, create up to 500 AI-powered notebooks, and add up to 300 sources per notebook. This translates to an additional $20 per user per month for Workspace subscribers. Starting next year, NotebookLM Plus features 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 blossomed into one of the most logical applications of Google’s Gemini AI model thanks to its grounding in sources you upload, rather than the web and whatever material Gemini was originally trained on. It is able to work with anything from web articles to but Audio Overviews has proven to be one of its most popular features.