Google's viral AI podcast tool can chat in over 50 languages now and it aced my Spanish test (2025)

Google's experimental AI notebook, NotebookLM, went viral because of its Audio Overview feature, which transforms text content into a podcast with two AI hosts. The discussion format helps break up dense content into a lively conversation, making it more digestible and especially great for studying or understanding content thoroughly -- and it is now coming to more languages.

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On Tuesday, Google announced that Audio Overview is expanding to over 50 more languages, powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro. The complete list includes Spanish, Afrikaans, and more. You can hear the two Audio Overview AI hosts break down the news in the YouTube video below.

The update includes a new "Output Language" option in NotebookLM's settings. This option allows you to change the language of the audio and chat responses anytime, making it easier to create content in another language.

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Potential use cases include breaking down content for someone whose first language is not English, learning a new language by having your content output in the language you are learning, and even translating content, such as research, into your own language.

I was given early access to the feature and was impressed with its accuracy and ease of use. First, I went to settings and changed the output language to español (latinoamerica). Then I uploaded a PDF of theGoogle I/O 2025preview article I wrote and clicked on "Audio Overview."

Although it took longer to generate the AI podcast than when I created it in English, it was still under five minutes. As a native Spanish speaker, I was pleasantly surprised by how natural the conversation sounded and how well it stuck to the news. I can confirm that it was all accurate in the facts and the conversational ad-libs around it.

I found this feature to be the most fascinating addition to NotebookLM because, as someone who has written articles in Spanish before, even as a native Spanish speaker, it can be challenging. News uses language you don't necessarily use in colloquial speech, making it hard to translate, especially because English-to-Spanish literal translations typically don't mean the same thing. NotebookLM managed to keep it conversational, organize the content in a digestible way, and add side comments, while staying true to the original text.

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The full list of languages include: Afrikaans, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Bengali, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish (European), Spanish (Latin American), Spanish (Mexico), Estonian, Basque, Persian, Finnish, Filipino, French (European), French (Canada), Galician, Gujarati, Hindi, Croatian, Haitian Creole, Hungarian, Armenian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Italian, Hebrew, Japanese, Javanese, Georgian, Kannada, Korean, Konkani, Latin, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maithili, Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Malay, Burmese (Myanmar), Nepali, Dutch, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Norwegian (Bokmål), Oriya, Punjabi, Polish, Pashto, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Albanian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Swedish, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional).

This news is particularly timely as Google announced last week that students get access to Google's One AI Premium Plan, which costs $20 per user per month, which includes access to the NotebookLM premium tier.NotebookLM Plus offers premium, subscriber-only features and five times higher usage limits to some of NotebookLM's best features, including Audio Overview, notebooks, queries, and sources per notebook.

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