Image source: Google.
First announced last year, NotebookLM - Google’s AI-powered research and writing assistant, is being upgraded with Gemini 1.5 Pro and introduced to users in over 200 countries and more than 100 languages worldwide.
NotebookLM is able to collate and keep track of your research notes, interview transcripts, and corporate documents, to help you understand and explore complex material, make new connections from information, and get to your first draft faster.
One of the languages supported in Korean. Image source: Google.
Announced in a blog post, today’s upgrade introduces several new features:
- NotebookLM now supports Google Slides and web URLs as sources, along with Google Docs, PDFs and text files. There are however, no plans to integrate it into Google Workspace.
- Inline citations now take you directly to supporting passages in your sources, so you can easily fact-check the AI response or dive deeper in the original text.
- Notebook Guide gives you a high-level understanding of your sources by converting them into useful formats like FAQs, Briefing Docs, or Study Guides.
Thanks to its use of Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro’s native multimodal capabilities, you can now ask questions about images, charts and diagrams in your Slides or Docs. NotebookLM will even include citations to images as supporting evidence when relevant. But the answers to queries about data or images will only come from the body of information added to the platform.
In a briefing to the media before the launch, Raiza Martin, senior product manager at Google Labs, said that as NotebookLM “is a closed system”, it wouldn’t do any web searches beyond reading the website content users add.
With Gemini 1.5 Pro’s native multimodal capabilities, NotebookLM can now understand and cite your questions about images, charts and diagrams in your sources. Image source: Google.
In terms of use cases, Google gave the example of NotebookLM’s ability to summarise and adapt interview transcripts is helping users identify patterns and themes in raw transcripts, saving hours of manual analysis. Author Walter Isaacson has been working with NotebookLM to analyse Marie Curie's journals for research for his next book.
There are some limitations though. For example, each notebook in NotebookLM has a 25-million-word limit but can have up to 50 sources per notebook and up to 500,000 words per source. There is also a limit of 100 notebooks. And while Google isn’t currently looking at integration with other note taking apps like Evernote, that may come down the road.
Getting started
A notebook and sources. Image source: Google.
If you’re new to NotebookLM, getting started is easy: When you first access NotebookLM, you’ll create a notebook and upload documents for a specific project or deliverable. At that point you can read, take notes, ask questions, organise your ideas, or ask NotebookLM to create automatic overviews of all your sources — a study guide, for example, or a table of contents.
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.