NotebookLM turns one year old and Google has introduced new features. In addition to text and pdf files, the AI tool will now read content directly from the web if you load a relevant URL. The app can also accept Google Slides, images and diagrams as it currently works with Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Google recently updated its note-taking AI assistant to Gemini 1.5 Pro, expanding its availability to more than 200 countries and territories, and introducing several new features. NotebookLM now supports web URLs and Google Slides as input to generate answers to related queries. Answers will also contain inline citations that link directly to relevant passages in the source material. Additionally, the Notebook guide is now capable of generating high-level summaries, overviews, and frequently asked questions.
The addition of NotebookLM to the most powerful version of Gemini means that users can now take advantage of the multimodal capabilities of Gemini 1.5 Pro to upload images that can be analyzed and cited. This feature works as well as expected, but since NotebookLM is a ‘closed system’, it won’t perform web searches or get any information outside of the aggregated sources. NotebookLM now allows up to fifty fonts, up from just five previously. However, each source is limited to 500,000 words, so the AI tool can only process 25 million words per notebook.
Google has shared a series of case studies on its blog highlighting several innovative uses of NotebookLM, such as biographer WalterIsaacson’s https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1793094718219599908 analysis of Marie Curie’s diaries, as well as podcasters and documentary researchers. “Source grounding” minimizes the risk of hallucination that AI assistants are often prone to, but does not eliminate it completely. Even so, larger issues come into play here. Privacy concerns remain, as NotebookLM will require users to voluntarily upload material for it to be of any help, unless Google finds a way to link it to Gemini Nano, the lighter version of Gemini that runs on the Pixel 8 Pro .
Although NotebookLM is still largely an experimental product, it has garnered support from a diverse 14,000-member community of writers, editors, students, and role-playing game enthusiasts https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm- goes-global-support-for-websites-slides-fact-check/#:~:text=role%2Dplaying%20game%20enthusiasts%20consulting%20detailed%20descriptions%20of%20fantasy%20worlds%20for%20games%20like%20Dungeons% 20and%20Dragons.. And as Google begins the global rollout of its note-taking AI agent, the community is set to grow even more.
Translator: Ninh Ngoc Duy – Editorial Assistant – 400328 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2008
