NotebookLM, Google’s AI-based note-taking service, is now available in the US

A hot potato: Google recently unveiled its Gemini AI service as a powerful, all-capable competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The demonstration video turned out to be fake, but the company is still betting everything on ML algorithms to infuse new capabilities into its cloud business.

Google introduced NotebookLM earlier this year as an experimental service to take notes and turn them into something useful (or meaningful) thanks to AI. The tool is now lifting some of its limitations, as Mountain View is expanding availability to all US users aged 18 and up.

NotebookLM is now a virtual “research assistant” based on the newly introduced Gemini Pro AI, Google’s new large-language model (LLM) designed for scaling across a wide range of tasks. Gemini AI’s presentation was controversial, to put it mildly, while Google describes NotebookLM as a new opportunity to “reimagine” the entire note-taking process thanks to a new, capable and personalized AI collaborator.

When users upload a series of documents to NotebookLM’s website, the AI algorithm becomes an “instant expert” on that information, Google explains. The AI can generate summaries and suggest follow-up questions, making difficult texts easier to understand or highlighting connections between multiple documents.

The latest NotebookLM release builds on Gemini Pro foundation, Mountain View says, and it also has a dozen new features based on feedback from “knowledge workers,” creators, students and educators who tested the initial release of the service. Google highlighted some of the most interesting capabilities added to NotebookLM, including the ability to turn chatbot interactions into new notes.

There’s a new “noteboard space” where users can pin quotes from the chat, excerpts from sources, or their own personal notes, Google explains. NotebookLM can also provide dynamic suggestions about actions based on what the user is doing, providing tools to polish or refine prose, understand technical language or “complicated ideas,” and more.

NotebookLM’s new and improved tools include the ability to organize curated notes into structured documents. By selecting a set of specific notes, users can ask the service to create something new and Notebook will suggest a few formats based on the notes’ contents. The chatbot can also be instructed to turn notes into something completely different including an email newsletter, a “script outline,” a draft, a marketing plan, and more.

Because AI continues to be a novel technological and creative terrain, Google is still treating NotebookLM as an experiment that needs users’ feedback to improve. Personal data should be safe, as private or sensitive information will stay private and will not be used to train future iterations of the service’s AI model.