[Fixed] Gemini app is failing to generate Audio Overviews

Abner Li | Apr 11 2025 - 6:55 pm PT

Besides 2.0 Experimental Advanced mysteriously appearing (and disappearing) earlier today, a bug with the Gemini app has resulted in users losing the ability to create Audio Overview podcasts.

Update 4/14: As of Monday, Google has resolved this issue.

Original 4/11: After uploading a file and tapping the “Generate Audio Overview” button that appears, Gemini says “your Audio Overview is being generated” and to wait a few moments.

The Gemini app does in fact send an “Audio Overview ready” notification, but returning to the chat reveals the following error message: “I cannot generate an audio overview because I do not have the capability to create audio files.”

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Gemini can still provide a text summary and you can ask questions about the document, while “Talk Live about this” works normally on mobile.

We’re seeing this issue with PDFs uploaded on Android and the web using both 2.0 Flash and 2.5 Pro (experimental). Audio Overviews were introduced last month for all users.

Podcasts in NotebookLM generate normally this evening. Hopefully, Google will be addressing this bug with Gemini’s Audio Overviews in short order.

While they’re at it, the Android and iOS apps would really benefit from a native audio player rather than requiring users to download audio files.

Meanwhile, the company announced earlier this week that Google Docs will soon get Audio Overviews, as well as a more straightforward text-to-speech capability.