Spotify launches AI tools to turn documents into podcasts and narrate audiobooks

Spotify is broadening its push into AI-generated audio with a new desktop app that lets people turn written material into personal podcasts, while also adding AI-powered Q&A and briefing tools and rolling out a separate audiobook creation feature built with ElevenLabs. The company said the new desktop app is being released as a research preview in more than 20 markets, in a move that appears designed to challenge Google’s NotebookLM, which can already generate audio overviews from source documents.

According to TechCrunch, the new app is aimed at people who want to listen to customized, spoken summaries of their own content rather than standard podcasts. Users can feed the tool prompts and materials, then generate audio briefings tailored to those inputs. Spotify is also adding features that let listeners ask questions about podcast content and create daily or weekly briefs based on their prompts, expanding the company’s effort to make its audio platform more interactive and useful as a research and productivity tool.

The timing matters because Spotify has increasingly been testing ways to move beyond music streaming and into AI-assisted listening and creation. Google’s NotebookLM has attracted attention for its ability to produce conversational audio summaries from documents, and Spotify’s new desktop app seems intended to compete in that same space by making audio a format for personalized information, not just entertainment. If widely adopted, the feature could appeal to students, professionals, and heavy podcast listeners who want a faster way to digest long documents or complex topics.

Spotify is also giving authors new tools to create audiobooks with the help of ElevenLabs, a voice technology company known for realistic synthetic narration. As reported by TechCrunch, the AI-powered audiobook generation tool will not require authors to sign an exclusive contract, meaning they can publish the finished audiobooks elsewhere as well. That approach could make the service more attractive to independent authors who want to test AI narration without giving up distribution rights.

Taken together, the announcements show Spotify trying to build a broader AI audio ecosystem: one that helps people create spoken content, summarize it, and interact with it. For Spotify, the move could deepen engagement on its platform and open new products beyond traditional listening. For users and creators, the changes may offer more convenient ways to produce and consume audio, while also raising fresh questions about how AI-generated voices and summaries will fit into publishing and podcasting workflows.