Google on Thursday stated it’s rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new international locations, practically six months after opening its entry within the U.S. The platform, powered by Google’s multimodal LLM Gemini 1.5 Professional, has additionally been upgraded with new options and languages to assist extra individuals use AI to generate summaries and ask questions primarily based on their paperwork.
The record of nations that NotebookLM now helps consists of Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the U.Okay., in addition to 208 different international locations and territories. Google has additionally broadened the interface language assist for the AI-assisted app to 108 languages, together with Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Cantonese, Chinese language, Dutch, French, German, Hindi and Hinglish. It additionally helps sources and chat in 38 languages, equivalent to Arabic, Bengali, Chinese language (simplified and conventional), Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Spanish.
NotebookLM, first demoed as Mission Tailwind at Google I/O in 2023, was initially accessible to a choose few customers in June final 12 months. It makes use of AI to assist generate summaries and reply questions from paperwork, transcripts, notes and different sources that customers can add. That is in contrast to a standard AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, which regularly doesn’t adhere to the supply customers present and generates data primarily based on the info used for its coaching that generally will be unrelated or fallacious.
Google can be giving NotebookLM the flexibility to supply content material from Google Slides and internet URLs, along with the present assist for Google Docs, PDFs and textual content information. This lets customers create notes or ask questions concerning the content material (whether or not it’s a picture or textual content) of their paperwork or discover on-line materials.
Some early customers of NotebookLM within the U.S. anticipated it might assist conventional note-taking apps, together with Evernote and Google Maintain. Nevertheless, Raiza Martin, senior product supervisor for AI at Google Labs, advised TechCrunch in a digital roundtable earlier this week that Google needed to give attention to the product’s core worth earlier than increasing integrations.
“Down the road, you’ll hopefully see these types of integrations,” she stated.
Google has additionally added inline citations that can assist you take a look at supporting passages in your sources, fact-check AI-generated responses, and browse the unique textual content for extra context. Beforehand, citations have been situated under the responses the assistant generated.
It additionally comes with Pocket book Information, which helps convert your content material into varied codecs, equivalent to FAQs, briefing paperwork or research guides.
Google Labs’ editorial director, Steven Johnson, stated NotebookLM was developed with authors, college students and educators, and the corporate noticed early adopters integrating its source-grounding structure into their analysis and writing workflows.
The corporate stated NotebookLM has additionally been used for creating hyperlocal newsletters, summarizing interview transcripts, growing grant proposals, and even managing descriptions of fantasy worlds.
Martin famous that Google doesn’t use any of the info customers add on NotebookLM to coach its algorithms.
“In particular, we get this question a lot because users want to be able to use it with work or school documents,” she stated. “Your data does stay private to you.”
At its Google I/O 2024 keynote in Could, Google confirmed off an early prototype of Audio Overviews for NotebookLM that makes use of the corporate’s Gemini mannequin to scan by way of the uploaded supplies and generate a podcast-esque dialogue. Gemini 1.5 Professional additionally lets NotebookLM have as much as 50 sources in every pocket book, with 500,000 phrases per supply.
The worldwide rollout of NotebookLM will doubtless pit it straight in opposition to the handfuls of platforms (learn startups) that at present let customers use GenAI instruments to do issues like reply their questions and summarize PDFs instruments. Most of those platforms cost for his or her companies, however Google’s heft is permitting it to supply this service free of charge.
