TL;DR
- Audio Overviews emerged as one of Google’s breakout AI hits, synthesizing virtual podcasts with a pair of hosts.
- After debuting with NotebookLM and spreading to other Google services, the company is experimenting with Audio Overviews in Search.
- For this initial test, access is limited to the US and only supports English.
Forgive us for sounding like a broken record by this point, but Google’s Audio Overviews have easily emerged as one of the company’s most genuinely impressive and useful AI tools. First debuting as part of the NotebookLM research assistant, Audio Overviews make text summaries a whole lot more accessible by crunching them down into what’s essentially a mini podcast, with a pair of virtual hosts chatting back and forth. We’ve seen Google expand access and bring Audio Overviews to more of its services since then, like Gemini this past spring, and now it’s coming to the granddaddy of them all: Search itself.
Google is offering users the opportunity to opt in to try anew Search Labs experiment, giving them early access to Audio Overviews in Search results.
Once you flip it on, you’ll start finding a new “Generate Audio Overview” button when running a Search. If you’re not immediately seeing it, try scrolling down, as right now Google’s featuring it distinctly from AI Overviews.
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
The company warns that it can take up to 40 seconds to do the research, synthesize the voices, and assemble your completed Audio Overview, but in our initial testing we saw results that were much more manageable — closer to 10 seconds. Obviously your mileage will vary, and a more complicated or obscure query may take a little longer. Just make sure you sit tight if you’re actually interested in hearing the results, as Google informs us that navigating away will discard the in-progress Overview.
This kind of feature makes perfect sense for Search, as it’s basically just repackaging solutions we already had. Back in April we saw NotebookLM pick up the ability to search down new source material on your behalf. This is more or less Search doing the same thing, and then piping that output into an Audio Overview, just like NotebookLM could. But by baking it right into Google’s most publicly facing service, this experiment has the potential to expose this impressive functionality to a whole lot more users.
Right now this experiment is only available in English and in the US, but considering how Audio Overviews in NotebookLM already support over 50 languages, we’re hopeful that won’t be the case for long.
