Google on Thursday updated the audio summarization feature in its AI note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM. NotebookLM has recently gained a lot of attention for its podcast-like audio conversations based on content shared by users, with the ability to guide conversations and focus on specific topics instead. It just generates an overall audio summary.
Now, NotebookLM's audio summaries allow users to digest and understand information in long documents and videos through AI-generated audio conversations. Shortly after its release last month, the feature helped NotebookLM gain traction, and many people began sharing audio summaries of content, including those created using diaries and journals, on social media.
Google hasn't disclosed the traction NotebookLM has received as a result, but data from website traffic analysis platform SimilarWeb shows that NotebookLM's traffic reached 3.07 million monthly visitors in September, up from 652,181 the previous month. It increased by more than 371%.
Previously, Audio Overviews automatically generated AI conversations from user sources. But conversations can sometimes revolve around unimportant content, so Google is introducing an update that lets you customize summaries based on your needs. This allows users to create audio that focuses on specific topics within their content.
A dedicated “Customize” control is provided in front of the existing “Generate” button, allowing you to instruct the AI host to focus on specific points within the audio.
Image credit: Google
Raiza Martin, product lead for NotebookLM and senior product manager for AI at Google Labs, told TechCrunch that the update will give users the power to push AI in the direction they want.
“The entire team has been dedicated to listening and analyzing all the feedback we've gotten, and the most important feature that people have asked for is giving AI a little extra help. I did,” she said.
Customizing audio summaries may reduce hallucinations to some extent. This means that the AI will create the content on its own. Nevertheless, Martin said the NotebookLM team is tracking user feedback and trying to catch hallucinations as soon as possible.
He also emphasized that customizing audio summaries does not mean that the user's instructions will be used to train the AI model.
“Typically we don't train on user data, so whatever queries we use, the queries we input, the answers we input, we don't train our models with it.” She said, adding, “We're looking for a lot of feedback from our users.”
In addition to customization options, users can listen in the background with an audio overview. This allows you to continue working within NotebookLM, query sources, receive citations, and explore related citations while the audio plays in the background.
NotebookLM was originally launched as a project at Google's I/O developer conference last year and became generally available in the US in December. In June, it expanded to more than 200 markets, including India and the UK. The product initially received some traction for education and research use cases, but it wasn't until Google expanded support for more sources and introduced new features that businesses and organizations started experimenting with the product. It was after I added it.
Currently, Google says more than 80,000 organizations are using NotebookLM and sees this as an opportunity to consider monetization. Hoping to capitalize on this traction, the company launched its NotebookLM Business pilot program on Thursday.
Businesses can apply for the pilot and, if approved, will get early access to product features, training and email support, Google said.
Image credit: Google
Martin told TechCrunch that under the business pilot, her team is training organizations interested in using NotebookLM on how other companies are using it.
“we [also] “What companies want us to know is: What features do we want to implement?” she said.
General availability and pricing for NotebookLM Business will be announced later this year. However, Google has not yet revealed exact schedule or price range details.
According to SimplyWeb, NotebookLM currently receives 4.17 million visits per month, including 2.5 million from desktops and 1.6 million from mobile devices.
Currently, the assistant does not have a dedicated mobile app and is available on various screens through the website. However, Martin told TechCrunch that the team is actively exploring a native mobile experience to expand NotebookLM's presence among smartphone users. We're also looking into adding voices, languages, and controls for audio overview.
Additionally, the team explored and prototyped different numbers of speakers to go beyond the existing two speakers for AI audio discussions, a feature Martin said was not the most requested by users. Therefore, it is unlikely to be available immediately.
Last month, NotebookLM added YouTube videos and audio files as sources for generating summaries, in addition to existing sources such as Google Drive, URLs, PDFs, and text.
Martin said NotebookLM considers PDFs and YouTube videos to be the top two sources. The team also observed a “very high percentage” of users who listened to audio summaries and used chat. The next largest group consists of users who only use chat without generating audio summaries.