Google’s AI-powered NotebookLM is now available to help organize your life
Google's AI-powered writing assistant, NotebookLM, is leaving its experimental phase and launching as an official service with multiple performance upgrades.
First unveiled at I/O 2023 as Project Tailwind, the tool's main purpose is to help organize your messy notes by creating a summary with details about what you've written down. It will even highlight important topics and ask different questions to help people better understand the material. The big update that coincides with the release is that NotebookLM now runs on Gemini Pro, which the tech giant claims is their “best (AI) model” for performing a wide range of tasks. It claims the AI model will improve the service's reasoning skills, as well as its ability to understand the documents it scans.
Additionally, Google has taken feedback from NotebookLM's five-month testing period and added 15 new features with the aim of improving the user experience.
Highlight features
The company highlights five specific features in its announcement, the first of which is a “new note board space.” In this area you can take quotes from the AI chat or snippets from your notes and pin them to the top for easier viewing. Then quotes in a response take you directly to the source, “allowing you to see (a) quote in its original context.”
Highlighting text in the mentioned resource will now suggest two separate actions. You can have the AI immediately 'summarize' the text in a separate note or ask it to define words or phrases, which can be useful if the topic is full of difficult concepts. At the bottom, users will see a wider range of follow-ups, from suggestions on how to improve your prose to related ideas you can add to your writing. NotebookLM will also recommend specific formats for your content, which will turn it into an email layout or the outline of a script, among other things.
The full list can be found at Google help website. Other notable features include increased word counts for resources (they can now total 200,000 words), the ability to share notebooks with others just like Google Docs, and support for PDFs.
Available soon
More updates are on the way. Starting the week of December 11, NotebookLM will receive seven additional features. They include a critique feature that lets you ask the AI for constructive feedback, plus a way to combine all your notes on one big page.
NotebookLM is only available in the United States to users 18 years and older on desktop and mobile devices. During your visit you will see some examples to help you get started with the service. It's worth noting that despite this being an official launch, Google still considers NotebookLM to be “experimental” technology, so it won't be perfect. No word on if there are plans for an international release, although we did ask. This story will be updated at a later date.
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