Google launched its note-taking app NotebookLM final yr for researchers, college students, and anybody who wants to arrange the knowledge they’ve gathered. Now, customers can now add Google Slides and internet URLs as sources, not simply the Google Docs, PDFs, and textual content information it accepted beforehand.
The brand new Pocket book Information additionally reads sources in NotebookLM and creates examine guides, FAQs, or briefing paperwork, and inline citations can level to your personal sources to fact-check AI responses — as much as 50 sources per “pocket book,” or mission, and every supply may be 500,000 phrases lengthy. Beforehand, folks might solely add 5 sources.
Customers may also now ask questions on charts, pictures, and diagrams they uploaded to the platform as a result of NotebookLM is operating on Google’s Gemini 1.5 Professional, the most recent giant language mannequin that at present powers the paid model of the Gemini chatbot. I used to be in a position to strive my hand at these options to see how they work.
In a briefing, Raiza Martin, senior product supervisor at Google Labs, instructed reporters that NotebookLM “is a closed system.” It won’t do any internet searches past studying the web site content material customers add. Martin says NotebookLM’s solutions to queries about information or pictures will solely come from the consumer’s “corpus” or physique of knowledge they add to the platform.
I attempted NotebookLM to see the brand new options in motion. The Pocket book Information was not but obtainable for reporters to strive, however I used to be ready so as to add new information sources, get inline citations, and get Gemini 1.5 Professional to take a look at graphs for me. I requested NotebookLM to offer me info from a PDF of a line graph, and it gave me the numbers I used to be in search of. I additionally requested it to summarize the textual content of the EU AI Act, and it was in a position to give me an summary and embrace citations so I knew the place it was pulling its solutions from.
Sadly, internet URL sources didn’t work in my demo: each time I pasted a hyperlink into NotebookLM, the mannequin would begin to add the web site, however it didn’t present up on my checklist of sources.
NotebookLM shouldn’t be a device that may write analysis papers for you, not like Perplexity’s Pages, which supposedly helps researchers discover information and make it simpler to share info (however, in my view, fails to take action).
Google gave examples of how folks have been utilizing NotebookLM, together with shouting out writer Walter Isaacson, who the corporate says used the platform to investigate Marie Curie’s journals for his subsequent guide. Google additionally says that nonprofits use NotebookLM “to determine wants in underserved communities and arrange info for grant proposals.”
Martin says that whereas NotebookLM’s audience stays researchers, college students, and infrequently writers, the corporate discovered different use instances, like a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon grasp who used NotebookLM to arrange a marketing campaign.
NotebookLM is now obtainable in over 200 international locations and territories and helps greater than 100 languages.