On Thursday, Google shared updates to its AI note-taking assistant, NotebookLM, enabling users to summarize YouTube videos and audio files. The tool now also supports sharable AI-generated audio discussions, expanding its reach to over 200 countries since its launch at last year’s I/O developer conference.
Originally designed for educators and learners, Google’s NotebookLM has evolved significantly. With recent advancements and innovations, its usage has expanded beyond the education sector, with businesses now accounting for 50% of its usage.
‘This shift illustrates the potential of NotebookLM in various industries,’ said Raiz Martin, senior product manager for AI at Google Labs.
Raiz Martin:
“People are now sharing notebooks, and it’s creating a network effect.”
The expanding horizon motivates the NotebookLM team to introduce innovative new features. As a result, NotebookLM has taken a bold step by launching an exciting feature that allows users to share an audio overview generated in NotebookLM via a public URL.
You can simply click on the share icon on the Audio Overview generated in the tool to get a URL for sharing.
Martin noted that professionals are using NotebookLM to upload web pages, resumes, and presentations to generate audio overviews, which they then share with employers, colleagues, and clients.
Exam day can be stressful, especially with the worry of taking notes while watching YouTube videos from tutors. But with NotebookLM’s new feature, those worries are gone! It now supports YouTube videos and audio files (.mp3 and .wav) as source types, along with Google Docs, PDFs, text files, Google Slides, and web pages.
Google has also launched its AI Podcast Tool, and with the increasing hype, it’s expanding its horizons. Users can now effortlessly summarize key points from YouTube videos and extract valuable takeaways from their audio recordings of study sessions or projects. It’s truly a game changer for enhancing learning and productivity!
Martin also stated that Google Labs’ small NotebookLM team relies on user feedback to drive new features, all powered by the company’s advanced multimodal large language model, Gemini 1.5 Pro.
“What’s interesting about AI tools is that a lot of assumptions change. What might have been useful last year might not be useful this year.”
With the rising popularity of NotebookLM, it is now accessible in 200 countries.
Martin noted that NotebookLM has gained popularity in the U.S. and is now making inroads in Japan, a significant market for the tool. She mentioned that the major use cases for NotebookLM so far include AI-based summarization in languages different from those originally set in the tool.
Martin:
“In Japan particularly, we see a lot of documents that are not in Japanese, but NotebookLM is set to Japanese. So people are querying in their native language, using it with probably complex and dense documents in English.”
Given the growing privacy concerns in today’s world, Google assures users that all information uploaded to NotebookLM will remain private and secure. Additionally, this data is not used for training their AI models, and access to the tool is restricted to users 18 years and older.
As an AI tool, NotebookLM faces challenges. Over-reliance on it could lead users to lose the habit of reading long-form content and research papers, potentially resulting in oversimplification.
To address this, NotebookLM provides clickable citations from uploaded content, allowing users to delve deeper into their summarized notes.
Martin:
“We encourage you to read your original text and double-check all answers from NotebookLM. You could choose SparkNotes or the actual book; it’s up to you.”
Currently, NotebookLM is web-based, but Martin indicated that mobile apps may be on the horizon for next year. Meanwhile, the team is focused on adding new features, enhancing input support, and expanding output sources.
