NotebookLM’s most beloved feature is coming to Google Drive

NotebookLM, Google’s research sidekick, is easily one of its most powerful AI tools. Although it packs a handsome set of features that make deep investigations far easier, features like audio and video overview make the learning process much more engaging. Inspired by its popularity, Google is extending one of these features to other apps.

Google is now expanding NotebookLM’s audio overviews to PDF files saved in your Google Drive. With this, content from any PDF can be converted into audio summaries with the same interactive podcast style as NotebookLM’s audio overviews.

Now, when you open a PDF file on your Google Drive, you will see a dedicated button to generate an audio overview at the top of the document preview. You can either click the button or type a prompt in the sidebar dedicated to interacting with Gemini. Based on the length of the document, Drive will generate an audio overview that’s anywhere between two and 10 minutes long, Google mentions in its announcement.

Currently, you can only create audio overviews on the web; however, we hope Google will add support for this feature in mobile apps soon.

When you click to play the generated audio overview, it opens in a new tab and plays like a regular audio file in your Drive. That’s because the generated overview is also stored as a separate file in your Google Drive. Unfortunately, however, the Gemini sidebar does not currently store any conversation history, so accessing the file later is made easier through this newly created file.

Currently, it doesn’t let you interrupt — or interact with — the AI podcast hosts as you can in NotebookLM. And just like NotebookLM, no progress sync or transcription features are currently available, although we hope Google will streamline these features in the future.

The audio overview — just like other Gemini features in Drive or Gmail — isn’t free at the moment. It requires either a Google Workspace membership (both Enterprise and Education versions are supported) or a paid Gemini subscription. Google says audio overviews for PDF files in Drive will roll out gradually starting today, i.e., November 12, and will be available to all Workspace and Gemini AI Pro or Ultra users over the coming weeks.

Google hasn’t specified regions for the rollout, so we can expect the feature to be available to users worldwide. However, it will be initially limited to documents in English only.