Since first bringing Audio Overview to NotebookLM, Google has slowly been rolling out one of its best AI-powered features to other parts of its ecosystem. The feature hit Google Docs back in August of this year, and now it’s coming to Google Drive as a whole, making it even easier to summarize PDFs save in your cloud storage.
Google announced the new feature in a blog post for Workspace. The addition is just one part of the ongoing changes that the company is making to Workspace with Gemini. To use this feature, all users need to do is open up a PDF and find the Audio Overview button at the top of the page. Clicking the button will trigger a confirmation to generate an Audio Overview, and once accepted, Gemini will get to work.
Much like NotebookLM, this will generate a spoken-word overview of the information, and you can play it directly on your device. Of course, depending on the size of the PDF, the overview may take some time to generate. The feature only supports English language PDFs at launch, though like all Gemini features, it will likely expand in the future.
How Audio Overviews change the game
The reason that Google has been pushing Audio Overviews so hard in all of its apps — even putting them directly in Chrome itself — is because of the simplicity it offers users, especially for digesting complex information. Google outlines three primary points for how Audio Overviews can help users, saying that it helps boost efficiency by “allowing users to quickly grasp the main points of a long document in a two- to 10-minute audio summary.”
Additionally, the company claims that these overviews can enhance how users prepare for interviews, meetings, or tests by making the process of reviewing material and consuming complicated content more accessible. Just like with NotebookLM, Audio Overviews in Google Drive are broken down like a podcast with two different AI hosts. This can help make the content more engaging. This won’t always be the best way to condense information, of course, so your mileage may vary on just how helpful it is for engaging with your PDFs.
It’s unclear at the moment if you’ll be able to interact directly with other documents like Microsoft Word files, but considering Audio Overviews are available in plenty of other Google services, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find one that works for what you need.
