Summarising sources and creating podcasts

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Using Google NotebookLM to generate your own podcasts Part two of a four-part series of blogs
Is there any limit to what AI tools can do? Google's NotebookLM tool summarises documents, websites and other sources using the medium of podcast. An introduction to NotebookLM Summarising sources and creating podcasts (this blog) Translating tthe resulting language or accents Summarising the rules of Zombieland as a podcast

Using Google NotebookLM to generate your own podcasts

Part two of a four-part series of blogs

Is there any limit to what AI tools can do? Google's NotebookLM tool summarises documents, websites and other sources using the medium of podcast.

An introduction to NotebookLM
Summarising sources and creating podcasts (this blog)
Translating tthe resulting language or accents
Summarising the rules of Zombieland as a podcast

Posted by Andy Brown on 27 February 2025

In this blog

Selecting your sources
Generating the podcast

I got NotebookLM to create a podcast summarising how to choose courses using our website (I thought I'd choose a subject I'm familiar with).

This is the podcast Notebook LM created - below I've explained how you can get to this stage.

You can jump forward and listen to the results here:

To create a podcast like this you need to choose your sources and then generate an audio overview, as explained under separate headings below.

Selecting your sources

The first thing to do is to click on the + Create new button above. You can then choose where your podcast will come from:

I chose to add a single source: this website.

You can now keep adding sources (up to 50):

Here I'm just using a single source.

Examples of sources might be PDF documents containing sets of rules or instructions, or a YouTube video showing how to do something.

Generating the podcast

This is very easy to do, but be aware that there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to cancel the process once it's begun:

NotebookLM has generated a summary of the sources I've uploaded (in this case a summary of this website), complete with a slightly weird icon. I can now click on the Audio Overview tool as shown to generate a podcast summarising the sources.

You should now see this message on the right side of your screen:

It takes a couple of minutes or to create the podcast, which is pretty quick.

You can then play or download your podcast:

The first podcast I gnereated was under 9 minutes long; when I tried to repeat the experiment the final podcast was quite a bit longer, at over 14 minutes.

If you want to see the original results the first time I tried this, you can download and listen to them using the audio at the start of this blog.

What you'll find is that while the podcast is impressive, it does use distinctively American accents. In the final part of this blog I'll show one way in which you can convert these into English accents (or any other "language", presumably).

Parts of this blog
An introduction to NotebookLM Summarising sources and creating podcasts (this blog) Translating tthe resulting language or accents Summarising the rules of Zombieland as a podcast