Gemini can now turn your Google Docs into podcasts

Were you clamoring for two AI-generated podcast hosts to talk through the key points of your document before you send it to your boss? No? Well, you’re getting it anyway. Google has announced new Gemini features coming to Workspace apps, including NotebookLM-style AI podcasts integrated right into Google Docs. There’s a wide spread of new features in this announcement, from an editor that can make suggestions in your documents to a tool that will help make sense of your spreadsheets, all with Gemini at the center.

Maybe the most uncanny of them all is the podcast feature, which exists in a couple of places already. It grabbed a lot of attention when Google offered it as part of its NotebookLM research tool, and it’s also available in the Gemini app when you upload a file. This update, which is coming to Workspace accounts “in the coming weeks,” will bring audio overviews right into Google Docs, along with the option to have AI read your article out loud. Having your writing read back to you is genuinely useful, but I used Gemini to generate one of these “podcasts” based on an article I wrote and I’m not in a hurry to do it again.

Another feature coming to Docs is a prompt to “Help me refine.” Rather than just doing the writing for you, it will leave comments with suggestions about how you can tighten up an existing draft. I’m familiar with this concept as an editor, and they’re hella useful. If you don’t have access to, you know, a person editor, an AI version might not be a terrible idea. This one will be available “later this quarter.”

Further out, Google has some lofty but vague promises for Sheets. Right now, you can ask Gemini for help with specific questions and tasks in Sheets, like generating visuals. A feature called “Help me analyze” offers a broader scope to help you make sense of your spreadsheet. In theory, it will help you identify trends and “guidance to get you started,” kind of like an on-demand data analyst. It sounds like we’ll have to wait a bit to try this one out — it’s coming “later this year.”