Get ready for Audio Overviews on your phone

Google has unveiled some rather neat AI tools over the past couple of years, and one of the coolest has to be Audio Overviews present in NotebookLM. Well, according to a new report, Audio Overviews could be coming to your phone via Gemini.

In case you don’t know what Audio Overviews are, they’re rather interesting. They live within Google’s NotebookLM platform. This is an AI-powered tool that you can use to organize and summarize notes for you. You can upload all types of content to the platform like PDFs, URLs, text, etc. It’s perfect if you’re trying to learn a certain subject. NotebookLM is free to use, so you can try it out if you want.

During Google I/O 2024, Google announced Audio Overviews. This is the tool that will convert your uploaded content into an audio podcast between two people. The podcast will act as an educational discussion to help you learn. This could be great for people who want to give their children a personal lesson.

You can try out Audio Overviews for free, but just know that Google is currently testing it out. So, there’s a chance that Google could charge for it in the future.

Audio Overviews could come to the Gemini app

Audio Overviews is a great feature, but it’s not quite as accessible as most other tools. This is because there’s no convenient way to access it with your phone. You can only access it from the NoteBookLM website.

However, Google plans to change this. Thanks to an APK deep-dive performed by Android Authority, we know that Google could bring this functionality to the Gemini app. Within the Google app version 15.48.33.sa.arm64, they found some strings pointing to this feature.

<string name=”assistant_zero_state_suggestions_create_podcast_prompt_query”>Generate audio overview</string>
<string name=”assistant_zero_state_suggestions_create_podcast_snippet_highlight”>Generate audio</string>
<string name=”assistant_zero_state_suggestions_create_podcast_snippet_simplified”>overview</string>

As you can see above, all of the strings have the text “create_podcast”. That’s a pretty dead give-away. So, just like with NotebookLM, you may be able to have Gemini create a discussion based on your conversation. We don’t know much more than that at the moment.

The folks at Android Authority were able to get the feature working… sort of. They got to the point where Gemini started creating the overview. However, it wouldn’t go further than generating a text summary of the uploaded document.

This means that Google is still working on making this feature functional. It’s still in the developmental stage. Right now, we don’t know when/if Google will launch this feature. We’ll keep you updated when it arrives.