Google is increasing the usability of its AI NotebookLM for note-taking

Last year, Google launched NotebookLM, a note-taking app for researchers, students, and anyone looking to organize their collected information. Now users can now submit Google Slides and website URLs as sources, not just the previously accepted Google Docs, PDFs, and text files.

The novel Notebook Guide also reads sources in NotebookLM and creates study guides, frequently asked questions (FAQs) or information documents, and in-text citations can point to your own sources to check AI answers to facts – up to 50 sources per “notebook” or project and per source may be 500,000 words long. Previously, users could only upload five sources.

Users can now ask questions about the charts, images and diagrams they have uploaded to the platform because NotebookLM runs on the Google Gemini 1.5 Pro platform, the latest multilingual model that currently supports the paid version of the Gemini chatbot. I had the opportunity to try my hand at these features to see how they worked.

During the briefing, Raiza Martin, senior product manager at Google Labs, told reporters that NotebookLM “is a closed system.” It will not perform any internet searches other than reading user-contributed content. Martin says NotebookLM’s responses to data or image queries will only come from the “corpus,” or collection of information a user has added to the platform.

I tried out NotebookLM to see the novel features in action. Reporters haven’t been able to try out Notebook Guide yet, but I was able to add novel data sources, get built-in quotes, and have Gemini 1.5 Pro look at the charts for me. I asked NotebookLM for information from a PDF containing a line chart and got the numbers I was looking for. I also asked him to summarize the text of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, which allowed me to provide an overview and include quotes so I knew where he was getting his answers.

Unfortunately, web URL sources didn’t work in my demo: whenever I pasted a link into NotebookLM, the model would start uploading the website, but it wouldn’t appear in my sources list.

NotebookLM is not a tool that will write your research papers for you, unlike Pages Perplexity, which claims to aid researchers find data and make it easier to share information (but in my opinion it doesn’t).

Google provided examples of its employ of NotebookLM, including praising author Walter Isaacson, who the company said used the platform to analyze Marie Curie’s diaries for his next book. Google also says nonprofits employ NotebookLM “to identify the needs of disadvantaged communities and organize information for grant applications.”

Martin says that while NotebookLM’s target audience remains researchers, students and often writers, the company has found other employ cases, such as: Dungeons and dragons a dungeon master who used NotebookLM to set up the campaign.

NotebookLM is currently available in over 200 countries and territories and supports over 100 languages.