In the earlier days of the internet, the World Wide Web was awash with ways to wander its wares, but now we're all mostly content to rely on Google as our go-to guide for getting things done online.
It's easy, it's practical, and, most importantly, it works. But trawling through Search results to find the answer you want (presented in a way that's easy to digest) can sometimes be a nightmare — and we don't all have the spare time to risk falling down a rabbit hole of distractions that leads you from "What's a good idea for a casserole?" to "Is the moon hollow, and how worried should that make me?"
So what if there was a way to quickly do all of that, sans the monotony of manually dragging your eyeballs through countless web pages? Well, there is.
It's called Audio Overviews, and it's a new podcast-like feature found in Google Searches that can help explain complex topics, provide an engaging way to learn new things, and let you do other things while Google Gemini translates thousands of Search results into a bite-sized, custom podcast tailored to your questions.
If you've ever found yourself staring blankly at a science paper titled Spectral Dispersion and Atmospheric Optics after Googling your 3 a.m. thoughts of "Why isn't pink found in rainbows?" and desperately wishing there was an episode of HowStuffWorks you could fall back on for an answer, Audio Overviews is your answer, and you can start using it right now in Google Labs.
Audio Overviews: The best NotebookLM feature heads to Google Search
Since its launch in 1998, there have been several major changes to improve the Google Search experience, but it's largely stuck to the same process: you type in your search request, hit search, and browse through the results.
Audio overviews bring something fresh to that experience, saving you the effort of trawling through results by using generative AI to compile a ton of useful information into a podcast-like audio snippet presented by two virtual hosts.
It's a feature ripped straight from the playbook of my favorite AI tool, NotebookLM — another Google service that makes for an excellent research aide, able to compile multiple sources of information into one easy-to-absorb document, or a similar AI-generated podcast snippet.
It's thanks to NotebookLM that I was ever able to write about complex topics like Microsoft's Majora 1 quantum processor, with its inner workings being so alien and confusing to me that it stands as the only time in life that I've gained knowledge and felt ultimately more stupid afterwards.
NotebookLM's Audio Overview feature gave me a crash course in quantum computing, helped me decipher the qubit, and ultimately served as an example of how to better deliver a complex topic to a curious mind.
Better still, it did it through the casual conversation of two impressively engaging virtual podcast hosts, effortlessly dropping knowledge bombs and explainers in the background while I went about my workday as normal.
Since then, I've been using NotebookLM to help me do the heavy lifting on topics I just don't have time in the day to fully dive into, and it's become an invaluable tool in my quest to convince strangers that I'm smart enough to have finished high school.
Now, with Audio Overviews arriving on Google Search, even more of us can reap the benefits of Google's AI-generated learning aides, and all become a little better off for it, if not in smarts, at least in time spent searching for answers.
How to use Audio Overviews in Google Search
You can test Audio Overviews in Google Search today by opting in to the experiment through Google Labs. Note, this feature is still in testing, and access is limited to Google Account owners in the United States.
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