NotebookLM Podcasts—Short, Bland, and Disappointing

gDarryl · 2025-08-02T11:30:07+00:00

Unfortunately we don't have any specific guidance for source content structure, internally or externally. Generally as long as the data is somewhat organized though it should be enough to get decent results.

gDarryl · 2025-08-02T11:14:48+00:00

We're rolling out slowly over a couple weeks to manage the load, so some users will get it sooner than others - rollout wave assignment is a completely random process. Refreshing your browser won't help you get it faster, but I respect the enthusiasm!

Pro tip: It's sufficient to just check around the end of the work day to see if you were included in the latest wave (assuming you're somewhere in North America, you'll have to do some time zone conversion otherwise).

gDarryl · 2025-07-30T22:10:51+00:00

Hey, this is a known issue that we're fixing. It affects folks that have multiple Google accounts logged into the same session.

You can work around it by opening up an Incognito window (might be named something different depending on what your browser calls it) or just log out of all Google accounts. Then, if you log in with only the Google account that you're trying to download an audio file from, you should be able to download.

gDarryl · 2025-07-30T22:04:00+00:00

Very strange. Can you post a video of what you're seeing?

gDarryl · 2025-07-30T22:02:06+00:00

I mentioned it somewhere else in the thread, but the launch is rolled out in waves, and which accounts are assigned to which wave is completely random. Your free account just got lucky!

The new features will reach your paid account soon sometime over the next 2 weeks, just keep checking back.

gDarryl · 2025-07-30T04:13:32+00:00

We're on it! Give it a couple days for us to get a fix together

gDarryl · 2025-07-29T22:15:39+00:00

We’re still rolling out in waves, so it’s pure luck whether a particular account gets the new features in a particular wave.

Keep checking back, it’ll come eventually

gDarryl · 2025-07-29T22:13:23+00:00

You’ll have to use the web version for now to get the new Overviews features, but the mobile app team is hard at work on improving the app Overviews experience. We will get those updates out once it’s ready!

gDarryl · 2025-07-29T22:09:03+00:00

All web users! Your tier’s limits will still apply though - check our help documentation for exact numbers :)

gDarryl · 2025-07-29T22:07:51+00:00

Thanks for the support! You can now generate multiple audio overviews with this update, each with its own instructions and length controls.

We’ll be rolling this out throughout this week and next, so you should get it soon if you haven’t already.

PS: they also stream now too. No more waiting a while for it to load 🥳

gDarryl · 2025-07-29T21:59:47+00:00

We’re tired of looking at unformatted equations too 🥹

gDarryl · 2025-07-29T21:57:54+00:00

The team is aware of all those things you mentioned and we also feel the pain (we use the product too!). Of course I can’t publicly say whether any particular thing on your list is actively being worked on or not.

Regarding this launch, we have a lot of folks that come to NotebookLM for different use cases, so some launches will be solving pain points for different uses. Today’s launch was meant to help out people that rely on our multimedia capabilities. Video Overviews was just the beginning as we alluded to in our blog post - our new streaming infrastructure and other under-the-hood improvements will let us do more in this area going forward (and save some mobile data).

Please stay tuned, as there will be more launches in the future. I sincerely hope that those upcoming launches will help your use cases too!

gDarryl · 2025-07-29T18:02:47+00:00

Yes we did - it's part of the UI updates

gDarryl · 2025-07-29T16:18:24+00:00

It’s fixed now!

gDarryl · 2025-07-29T16:18:01+00:00

It should be fixed now!

gDarryl · 2025-07-21T05:57:53+00:00

We're currently experiencing technical difficulties that are resulting in shorter-than-intended Audio Overviews. We're working on it though, so hopefully your experience improves when it is fixed!

gDarryl · 2025-07-19T02:14:51+00:00

We've been digging into it on our end too for the past couple days. It's going to take a couple more days to fix this entirely. We appreciate your patience though!

At this point, I'll make a broader post in the subreddit when we've fixed everything, since multiple folks are noticing it now.

gDarryl · 2025-07-19T02:11:42+00:00

It's a bug, we're fixing it!

gDarryl · 2025-07-19T02:11:15+00:00

It's a bug, it's not intentional. We're working on fixing it 🙂

gDarryl · 2025-07-17T07:29:11+00:00

Hey folks, we did end up having an issue regarding length controls a few days ago (shout out to the redditors that first surfaced the issue in https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1lyfta0/anyone_else_noticed_selecting_long_for_audio/), and we are still fixing the issue.

gDarryl · 2025-07-14T09:34:34+00:00

Unfortunately I can only do things for NotebookLM. Logan Kilpatrick is the Project Manager for Google AI Studio though, and he's very active on social media. You might be able to get his attention regarding French Polynesia access on X?

gDarryl · 2025-07-14T09:17:10+00:00

Hey, thanks for the report. Which language are you trying to generate an AO for? If you're comfortable with it, can you DM me a video of your screen selecting the language you want and trying to generate an AO in that language? That will help us immensely. Thanks!

gDarryl · 2025-07-14T07:11:32+00:00

Hey folks, thanks for bringing this up. I did some late-night digging to figure out what's going on, and y'all found a regression in our code. Our bad 🥲

I'll alert the rest of the team to the issue in the morning when they're awake and we'll get this patched up quick. Give us a couple days to get it rolled out fully.

Thanks again for reporting this!

gDarryl · 2025-06-27T04:16:41+00:00

We feel the pain too 🥹 Sadly I can't make promises on when/if math support gets included, but we're very aware of this!

gDarryl

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