Google on Thursday announced that its AI-powered note-taking assistant, NotebookLM, is expanding to more than 200 new countries, about six months after its launch in the U.S. Powered by Google's multimodal LLM, Gemini 1.5 Pro, the platform also adds new features and languages, allowing more people to use the AI to generate summaries and ask questions based on documents.
The list of countries NotebookLM currently supports includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the UK, as well as 208 other countries and regions. Google has also expanded the AI-assisted app's interface language support to 108 languages, including Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Cantonese, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, and Indian English. It also supports sources and chats in 38 languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Spanish.
NotebookLM was first demoed at Google I/O 2023 as Project Tailwind and first rolled out to some users last June. The app uses AI to generate summaries and answer questions from sources such as documents, transcripts, and notes that users can upload. This differs from traditional AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, which often don't follow the sources users provide and instead generate information based on the data they used to train it, which can sometimes be irrelevant or incorrect.
In addition to existing support for Google Docs, PDFs, and text files, Google will also give NotebookLM the ability to pull content from Google Slides and web URLs, allowing users to make notes and ask questions about content in documents (images or text) and search online materials.
Some early NotebookLM users in the U.S. had expected it to support traditional note-taking apps like Evernote and Google Keep, but Raiza Martin, senior product manager for AI at Google Labs, told TechCrunch during a virtual roundtable earlier this week that Google wanted to focus on the product's core value before expanding the integration.
“I hope to see more of these types of consolidations in the future,” she said.
Google has also added inline citations so that you can see supporting text in sources, fact-check AI-generated answers, and read the original text for more context. Previously, citations were found underneath Assistant-generated answers.
It also comes with a notebook guide that helps you convert your content into different formats such as FAQs, instruction documents, study guides, and more.
NotebookLM and Notebook Guide Image credit: Google
Stephen Johnson, editorial director at Google Labs, said NotebookLM was developed in collaboration with authors, students and educators, and the company has seen early adopters integrate its source-grounding architecture into their research and writing workflows.
The company says NotebookLM is used to create hyperlocal newsletters, summarize interview transcripts, write grant applications, and even manage fantasy world descriptions.
Martin pointed out that Google doesn't use any of the data users upload to NotebookLM to train its algorithms.
“This is a common question, especially since many users want to use it for work or school documents,” she said. “User data remains private.”
During the Google I/O 2024 keynote in May, Google showed off an early prototype of Audio Overviews for NotebookLM, which uses the company's Gemini model to scan uploaded materials and generate podcast-style discussions. With Gemini 1.5 Pro, each notebook in NotebookLM can store up to 50 sources, with 500,000 words per source.
NotebookLM's global rollout will put it in direct competition with dozens of platforms (i.e. startups) that currently allow users to use GenAI tools to answer questions, summarize PDFs, etc. Most of these platforms charge a fee for their service, but Google's power allows the service to be offered for free.