Google Enhances NotebookLM with New Features for Better Note-Taking

NotebookLM, now powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, can access and interpret data from websites and Google Slides.

Last year, Google launched NotebookLM to help researchers, students, and anyone needing to organize gathered information. The app now allows users to upload Google Slides and web URLs as sources, expanding beyond the previously accepted Google Docs, PDFs, and text files.

The new Notebook Guide feature reads these sources to create study guides, FAQs, or briefing documents, with inline citations pointing to your own sources to verify AI responses. Each "notebook" can handle up to 50 sources, with each source containing up to 500,000 words. Previously, users could only upload five sources.

With the Gemini 1.5 Pro upgrade, NotebookLM can now answer questions about charts, images, and diagrams uploaded to the platform. This latest large language model also powers the paid version of the Gemini chatbot.

In a briefing, Raiza Martin, senior product manager at Google Labs, explained that NotebookLM operates as a closed system, meaning it won't perform web searches beyond reading user-added website content. The AI's responses are based solely on the information users provide.

I tested NotebookLM's new features, adding new data sources and using inline citations. Gemini 1.5 Pro successfully extracted information from a PDF of a line graph and summarized the text of the EU AI Act, providing source citations. However, web URL sources didn't work during my demo; the model attempted to upload websites but failed to list them as sources.

NotebookLM is not designed to write research papers, unlike Perplexity’s Pages, which aims to help researchers find and share data but falls short, in my opinion.

Google shared examples of NotebookLM's use, highlighting author Walter Isaacson’s analysis of Marie Curie’s journals for his next book and nonprofits using the platform to organize information for grant proposals. Additionally, a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master used it to prepare a campaign.

NotebookLM is now available in over 200 countries and territories, supporting more than 100 languages.