Google adds Spanish and French to NotebookLM in huge language update

NotebookLM is one of Google’s lesser-used AI products but it introduced a feature that’s becoming increasingly popular — Audio Overviews. The company already brought it over to Gemini and plans to add the feature to Google Docs in the next few months too. Until now, Audio Overviews has been an English-only tool but as of this week, it’s available in over 50 languages.

The NotebookLM platform is all about putting together notebooks of information and different sources and using LLMs to interact with them. Audio Overviews is basically a fancy summary tool — it lets you generate audio summaries of your selected sources that are presented in the style of a podcast with two AI hosts.

Though you could always use source material in any language to generate an Overview, the audio content was previously only available in English. Now, you can easily switch to Spanish, French or any of the 50+ languages Google has added this week.

This will make it really easy to consume just about any content without having to search out translations in your preferred language. You can listen to an Audio Overview of a brand-new Japanese research paper that hasn’t been translated yet, or consume super-niche English content that hasn’t been translated to Spanish. This also combines the feature’s original benefit of summarizing and simplifying content so you can get the gist of something really long or complex in a much quicker and more accessible format.

Since NotebookLM is marketed primarily as a study tool, it also occurs to me that this feature could be great for language learning. Consuming familiar content in your target language is a really accessible way to start boosting your comprehension skills.

For reading, for instance, it’s really common for people to pick up the “Harry Potter” books in their target language because everyone knows the story. For listening, you can take whatever kind of written information you’re familiar with and convert it into a podcast in your target language to listen along to. A new “Output Language” option has also been added so you can easily switch between languages at any time and create multilingual content.

Google’s blog post about the update focuses on NotebookLM specifically, and it seems the additional languages aren’t available for Gemini yet. If you don’t want to wait, NotebookLM is available for free and anyone on Google’s One AI Premium plan also has access to NotebookLM Plus.