Google on Thursday announced a new update to NotebookLM, its AI note-taking and research assistant that lets users get summaries of YouTube videos and audio files, as well as create shareable AI-generated audio discussions. The search giant is looking to expand the use cases and reach of the tool, which was originally announced as a project at last year's I/O developer conference and expanded to India, the UK and more than 200 other markets a few months after its public launch in the US.
Initially used by educators and learners, NotebookLM has seen a significant shift in its user base in recent times and is now attracting more people in workplace environments.
In an exclusive interview, Lisa Martin, senior product manager for AI at Google Labs, said the tool's users are currently roughly 50 percent educators and learners, and the other half are business professionals.
“People are now sharing notes, and that creates a network effect,” she told TechCrunch.
This has enabled the NotebookLM team to drive the introduction of new features aimed at increasing network effects and spreading the tool among people of different age groups.
Earlier this month, NotebookLM added Audio Overview, enabling users to turn documents into engaging audio discussions. With the latest update, we've expanded that experience by allowing users to share their NotebookLM-generated Audio Overviews via a public URL.
To use this feature, click the share icon on the audio summary generated by the tool to get a URL, then copy it and share it with others.
Martin says her team has seen professionals upload web pages, resumes and even presentations into NotebookLM to generate audio summaries that they can then share with employers, colleagues or clients.
In addition to the existing support for Google Docs, PDFs, text files, Google Slides, and web pages, NotebookLM now also adds support for YouTube videos and audio files (such as .mp3 and .wav) as new source types. The new functionality enables users to summarize key points from YouTube videos and generate takeaways and insights from audio recordings of study sessions and projects.
Image credit: Google
Martin told TechCrunch that Google Labs has a small team working on NotebookLM, powered by the company's multi-modal large-scale language model, Gemini 1.5 Pro, so every new feature the team adds to the tool is based on user feedback.
“The interesting thing about AI tools is that a lot of the assumptions change,” she says. “What worked for you last year might not work for you this year.”
Google expanded access to NotebookLM to more than 200 countries in June after initially launching it in the U.S. late last year.
Without providing specific figures, Martin told TechCrunch that while the majority of NotebookLM users are still in the U.S., Japan is emerging as the tool's next big market. He also highlighted that some users are using NotebookLM to get AI-based summaries in a different language than the one they set in the tool.
“Especially in Japan, we see a lot of documents that are not in Japanese, but NotebookLM is set to Japanese,” she says, “so people are running queries in their native language and using it against possibly complex, dense documents that are written in English.”
Google says the information users upload to NotebookLM will remain private and won't be used to train AI models. Users must be 18 or older to access the tool.
Nevertheless, due to its nature as an AI tool, NotebookLM faces some inherent challenges. First, if users become too reliant on NotebookLM, they may quickly lose the habit of reading long-form content and research papers. This can also lead to problems of oversimplification.
Martin told TechCrunch that her team is well aware of these concerns.
NotebookLM provides clickable citations from user-uploaded content, helping users gain a deeper understanding of their summarized notes.
“We encourage reading the source text. We encourage double-checking all the answers that come out of NotebookLM. You can read SparkNotes or you can read the actual book. It's always up to you,” she said.
NotebookLM is currently limited to the web, but Martin hinted that a mobile app could be released sometime next year.
Meanwhile, the team has been busy adding new features, and Martin said they'll be focusing on improving support on the input side and adding new sources for output.