Google makes its AI NotebookLM for note-taking more useful

Google launched its NotebookLM note-taking app last year for researchers, students, and anyone who needs to organize collected information. Users can now upload Google Slides and web URLs as fonts, not just the previously supported Google Docs, PDFs, and text files.

The new Notebook Guide also reads sources in NotebookLM and creates study guides, FAQs, or informational documents, and in-line citations can point to your own sources to fact-check AI answers – up to 50 sources per “notebook” or project, and each source can be 500,000 words. Previously, people could only upload five fonts.

Users can now also ask questions about charts, images, and diagrams they’ve uploaded to the platform because NotebookLM is running on Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, the latest large language model that currently powers the paid version of the Gemini chatbot. I was able to try out these features to see how they work.

In a briefing, Raiza Martin, senior product manager at Google Labs, told reporters that NotebookLM “is a closed system.” It will not do any web searches other than reading content added by website users. Martin says that NotebookLM’s responses to queries about data or images will only come from the user’s “corpus” or set of information that they add to the platform.

I tried out NotebookLM to see the new features in action. Notebook Guide wasn’t yet available for reporters to try, but I was able to add new data sources, pull inline citations, and have Gemini 1.5 Pro analyze the charts for me. I asked NotebookLM to provide me with information from a PDF of a line chart and it gave me the numbers I was looking for. I also asked him to summarize the text of the EU AI Law, and he was able to give me an overview and include quotes so I knew where he was getting his answers from.

Unfortunately, the web URL fonts didn’t work in my demo: whenever I pasted a link into NotebookLM, the template started loading the website, but it didn’t appear in my fonts list.

NotebookLM is not a tool that will write research papers for you, unlike Perplexity’s Pages, which is supposed to help researchers find data and facilitate information sharing (but, in my opinion, doesn’t).

Google gave examples of how people have used NotebookLM, including highlighting author Walter Isaacson, who, according to the company, used the platform to analyze Marie Curie’s diaries for his next book. Google also states that nonprofits use NotebookLM “to identify needs in underserved communities and organize information for grant proposals.”

Martin says that while NotebookLM’s target audience continues to be researchers, students, and often writers, the company has found other use cases, such as a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master who used NotebookLM to prepare a campaign.

NotebookLM is now available in more than 200 countries and territories and supports more than 100 languages.