Create Engaging French Podcasts with NotebookLM: Essential Steps to Follow

NotebookLM: Now Offering Audio Overviews in 50 Languages

Launched in the summer of 2023, NotebookLM is a tool developed by Google designed to help organize your projects and documents using artificial intelligence. It enables the creation of a collection of sources including texts, links, and videos, which the AI uses to answer queries or generate summaries. For over a year, NotebookLM remained relatively under the radar, but it gained traction on social media in the fall of 2024 due to its Audio Overviews feature, which automatically produces podcasts from your sourced materials.

Until now, although the documents could be in French, the podcasts could only be generated in English. However, as of Tuesday, April 29, Google has expanded support to include 50 additional languages, including French.

Audio previews are generated in the default language of your account. This update also introduces a new “Output Language” option in the NotebookLM settings; audio previews will always be generated in the language you select here. You can change the language at any time, and your audio and chat responses will reflect this change, according to Google.

How to Create a Podcast in French Using NotebookLM?

To create a podcast in French with NotebookLM, start by setting the language. To do this, select Settings (located at the top right of the interface), Output Language, French, and then click on Save. Following these steps, both the AI’s written responses and the podcasts will automatically be produced in French.

Next, Audio Overviews requires sources to produce its podcast. To build your resource collection, click Create from the homepage. Then add your chosen sources, making sure they are well-connected to form a coherent podcast. You can choose to create a serious production (often used by students to summarize their courses) or have fun by asking the AI to create a podcast about you!

Last week, during Google’s trial, BDM published a series of articles on web browsers, revisiting the history and strategies of Google Chrome, Arc, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox. What if we asked NotebookLM to summarize this series in a podcast? To access this synthesis, we integrated all the texts and then, on the right side of the interface in the Deep Conversation section, we clicked on Generate.

After a few minutes, our podcast was ready. Like all productions from Audio Overviews, it includes two speakers, a man and a woman. The summary provided is particularly convincing. The tone is very natural, similar to what one might hear on the radio.

For more information on how NotebookLM works, we invite you to consult our guide!