One click, and you’ve got two AI voices having what sounds like the world’s most scripted coffee shop conversation about whatever you just Googled.
It’s called Audio Overviews and works like the feature in NotebookLM, powered by Gemini’s text-to-speech. As usual, it’s only live in Search Labs in the US for now. And weirdly, it’s not in AI Mode—just regular Search.
I decided to test-drive this thing with “Murderbot”—Martha Wells’ surprise book hits that are now also a series. After hitting the magic button I had to wait 40 seconds while Google’s servers were apparently having an existential crisis, scripting and rendering this audio from scratch.
The result?
A male voice plays interviewer with super short questions, while a female voice does the explaining—always in bite-sized chunks. The back-and-forth makes it sound lively, important, even urgent. But after a while, the trick gets old.
At one point the male voice says: “I’ve read that Murderbot is an analogue for a generation raised on the Internet” with zero attribution. (It’s from some mid-tier take in what’s clearly an SEO-optimized Time.com piece.)
I swear around the 0:50 mark, one of the speakers calls the novella “All Systems Reddit” instead of “Red.” Like, did the AI just… glitch?
Oh, and they say “delve” twice. Because of course they do.
They do eventually acknowledge their sources—sort of. At the very end of this four-minute audio journey, there’s this: “To learn more, check out the listed sources below.”
We’re still mourning the death of blue underlined links, barely adjusting to AI Overviews, and now the content gets liquefied before our eyes.
If only it had stumbled across that actually good New Yorker piece on Murderbot—the one that doesn’t just name-drop Martha Wells like she’s some random indie author, but actually takes the time to explain what these books are about and why they matter.
A summary can only be as good as its sources.
(Video on LinkedIn)
