- Google Docs introduces a new audio overview feature
- Audio overviews can read your documents aloud or summarize them as a podcast
- The tool aims to help users improve their writing and enable multitasking
Reading your writing aloud is one of the best ways to discover any errors or awkeness that can use some editing. But as the author, you may have a blind spot for your own typing errors or be too close to what you wrote to notice where it needs some rewrite (or direct cutting).
So if you don’t always have a friend available to help, Google will start jumping in with a new audio overview feature for Google Docs.
Audio listings are already part of Google’s Notebooklm platform. Now Google sends the “natural sounding” story to Google Docs to read your documents aloud.
The goal is for the user to hear audio listings read a document back to you, revealing any wrong word and a stated phrase that you did not hear when you wrote it.
Google also includes another option besides just getting an AI recitation. You can hear what the company calls a “podcast style overview” of the text, which just means a collection of the highlights instead of every single word. For texts that are more than a dozen pages long and full of research, it can be a great help.
Unfortunately, this is not the kind of podcast style review that is available on Notebooklm, which will generate an actual conversation between two AI voices that discuss everything you have uploaded.
Recites AI
Google claims that the voices cannot be distinguished from an actual human being, and if it is the same AI voice model used by notebooklm, it is not far from the truth. Of course, wrong pronunciation, especially decent nouns they haven’t heard before are a very human foibel when reading aloud. It may not mean much if it also catches your actual errors.
The feature also has a great advantage of availability, as AI voices that read text have been a blessing to people with reduced vision or other reading difficulties. An upgraded, more natural -sounding voice to read Google Docs would only make text more accessible. Plus, it can help anyone who just has a lot going on. You could ‘read’ a long report while driving, folding laundry or doing something else keeping your eyes busy.
This is not a world-shaking feature, but it is the kind of improvement in quality of life to a widely used product, Google Docs that AI is uniquely suitable for delivering. It is difficult to argue that it is unnecessary to use AI to improve the productivity software to make it more adaptive.
Everything to streamline how to polish your writing will be a draw. Not that Google is unique in this persecution as both Microsoft and Apple have experimented with similar AI enlargement of their word processors.
Still, Google Doc’s go-to is for millions of people, students and professionals, and this step makes the product so much easier to stick to.
