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NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages

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Re: NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages

#21
post #17

NotebookLM audio overviews/podcasts have been an absolute boon for my homeschooled kids. They devour audiobooks and podcasts, and they love learning by listening to these first. Then when we come together for class, we discuss what was covered, and can spend time diving into specifics or doing activities based on the content. It’s super nice to have another option for a learning medium here. To generate them, we’ve s…

I've used them. They're very nifty. Google did good here.

One thing I'll note is they only cover the "high level" aspects. No depth. I'd recommend them for someone who is either already very knowledgeable or for someone not at all knowledgeable who is looking for an overview before they plan to do deeper learning/studying through reading.

Re: NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s interesting is that the create podcast thing is just a feature of NotebookLM. But everyone thinks that’s what NotebookLM is

It seems to be the only unique feature though. Any LLM can summarize things for me or make bullet points.

If you have a corpus of documents you are working with (say thousands of pages of related standards docs), Notebook can be handy for doing targeted summaries of aspects of the docs with pointers back into the actual docs to the relevant source material. That's something I end up needing a lot (I've never used the podcast feature) and so it feels very differentiated to me...

Re: NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages

#23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s useful for getting summaries of long YouTube videos - I’m found it semi helpful for improving my Davinci Resolve skills. That said Google is screwing the pooch as usual by trying to make it another walled garden. Slap an API on NoteboolLM already! The market research has already been done - there’s even an unofficial API https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1eti9iz/api_for...

For YouTube videos it's hard to beat (1) copy transcript to clipboard (from eg tactiq) (2) paste into LLM chat and ask for summary

It's hard for every AI product to beat that workflow lol. It works well for basically everything.

Re: NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages

#24
post #10

I find the podcast style audio it produces super annoying. Is there an easy way to simply have text read to me unaltered?

Absolutely the same complaint. I wanted to see if it could summarize papers well, but I just could not handle all the conversation and attempts to make it 'exciting'. Especially in areas where I already know the background.

Re: NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages

#25
post #6

Do people find NotebookLM useful? For my use case of converting papers into podcasts, the explanations are too general (which misses the important parts of the paper) and contain too much fluff. I suspect that changing the underlying model to Gemini 2.5 Pro would produce better transcripts, but right now there's no way of determining what model is being used.

I find NotebookML really useful as a book reading companion, by simply uploading the same book I want to read and asking questions about it, like:

- List the characters in chapter [x] and add a small description about each one. - What's [x] device used for? - What happened in chapter [x]?

It works very well without hallucinations and referencing all the answers.

Re: NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages

#26
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s useful for getting summaries of long YouTube videos - I’m found it semi helpful for improving my Davinci Resolve skills. That said Google is screwing the pooch as usual by trying to make it another walled garden. Slap an API on NoteboolLM already! The market research has already been done - there’s even an unofficial API https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1eti9iz/api_for...

For YouTube videos it's hard to beat (1) copy transcript to clipboard (from eg tactiq) (2) paste into LLM chat and ask for summary

Full disclosure, I work for Google opinions are my own etc etc

The LLM built into YouTube is one of the few LLM chatbots bolted onto existing apps that I actually find useful. Not just for summaries but questions like "what is the timestamp in this 2 hour video where they talk about _____".

Re: NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages

#30
post #6

Do people find NotebookLM useful? For my use case of converting papers into podcasts, the explanations are too general (which misses the important parts of the paper) and contain too much fluff. I suspect that changing the underlying model to Gemini 2.5 Pro would produce better transcripts, but right now there's no way of determining what model is being used.

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