Google’s AI note-taking app is now available to all users in the United States who are at least 18 years old, according to the company was announced the manufacture. The experimental app also gets a number of new features and starts using Gemini Pro, Google’s new large language model, to “help understand and reason about documents.”
Once you upload documents to NotebookLM, the application can automatically generate summaries and suggest follow-up questions about the content of the documents. Unlike generic chatbots that rely on large amounts of irrelevant information, NotebookLM focuses exclusively on the documents it feeds.
Now, Google is adding new features to the product to go beyond creating summaries and asking questions.
NotebookLM now has new tools designed to help users organize their curated notes into structured writing projects. For example, you can select a set of notes and ask NotebookLM to create something new, such as a script outline, an email newsletter, or a draft of a marketing plan.
Additionally, NotebookLM can now suggest actions based on what you’re currently doing. For example, say you selected a passage while reading a source. NotebookLM will automatically offer the summary of the selected text in a new note or help you understand the content of the text. In another case, let’s say you’re writing a note. NotebookLM will offer to improve your prose or suggest relevant ideas from your sources based on what you’ve written so far.
Image Credits: Google
The tech giant is adding a new notebook space to let you easily pin chat snippets or your own written notes. Google says the new space was a key request from users who said they wanted the ability to save their NotebookLM exchanges as notes.
Google is also making a few other minor tweaks to the product. Now when you add a note, NotebookLM will create an independent new note instead of adding it to a single notebook. And when you click on the reference number in a chat reply or saved note, you’ll be instantly taken to the original quote at the source.
If you want to focus solely on taking notes, you can now hide the source. And if you want to focus NotebookLM’s AI on selected sources, you can chat with a specific set of sources in your notebook by selecting them individually in the source sidebar. Additionally, Google is adding PDF support and text copy support, which means you can now copy and paste text to create a new source and edit the title once it’s created.
In addition to the new features, Google is also expanding the product’s limitations, as notebooks can now include up to 20 sources, and a source can now contain up to 200,000 words.
Today’s announcement comes roughly five months after the tech giant made NotebookLM available to a select few. Google first introduced its “Notebook AI for Everyone” during Google I/O earlier this year as Project Tailwind before renaming it NotebookLM. At the time, Google said the app could be used by students as a way to organize lecture notes and other documents while completing courses.
NotebookLM is promising, but as TechCrunch’s Devin Coldeway previously noted, let’s hope the product doesn’t end up in the Google Graveyard like many of the tech giant’s other experimental projects.
