Google announced on Thursday that it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries and territories, nearly six months after opening access in the U.S. The platform, powered by Google's multimodal large language model (LLM) Gemini 1.5 Pro, has also been upgraded with new features and language support to help more people worldwide use artificial intelligence to generate summaries and ask questions based on their documents.
The list of countries that NotebookLM now supports includes major markets like Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, and the U.K., as well as 208 other countries and territories. Google has also broadened the interface language support for the AI-assisted app to 108 languages, including Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Cantonese, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi and Hinglish. It also supports sources and chat in 38 languages, such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Spanish.
NotebookLM, first demoed as Project Tailwind at Google I/O in 2023, was initially available to a select few users in June last year. It uses AI to help generate summaries and answer questions from documents, transcripts, notes and other sources that users can upload. This is unlike a traditional AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, which often does not adhere to the source users provide and generates information based on the data used for its training that sometimes can be unrelated or wrong.
Google is also giving NotebookLM the ability to source content from Google Slides and web URLs, in addition to the existing support for Google Docs, PDFs and text files. This lets users create notes or ask questions about the content (whether it is an image or text) in their documents or explore online material.
Some early users of NotebookLM in the U.S. anticipated it would support traditional note-taking apps, including Evernote and Google Keep. However, Raiza Martin, senior product manager for AI at Google Labs, told in a virtual roundtable earlier this week that Google wanted to focus on the product's core value before expanding integrations.
Google has also added inline citations to help users look at supporting passages in their sources, fact-check AI-generated responses, and read the original text for more context. Previously, citations were located below the responses the assistant generated. It also comes with Notebook Guide, which helps convert your content into various formats, such as FAQs, briefing documents or study guides.
Google Labs' editorial director, Steven Johnson, said NotebookLM was developed with authors, students and educators, and the company saw early adopters integrating its source-grounding architecture into their research and writing workflows. The company said NotebookLM has also been used for creating hyperlocal newsletters, summarizing interview transcripts, developing grant proposals, or even managing descriptions of fantasy worlds. Martin noted that Google does not use any of the data users upload on NotebookLM to train its algorithms.
At its Google I/O 2024 keynote in May, Google showed off an early prototype of Audio Overviews for NotebookLM that uses the company's Gemini model to scan through the uploaded materials and generate a podcast-esque discussion.
Gemini 1.5 Pro also lets NotebookLM have up to 50 sources in each notebook, with 500,000 words per source. This advanced multimodal LLM enables NotebookLM to understand and generate content from images, charts and diagrams within documents, in addition to text.
The model's native multimodal capabilities allow users to ask questions about visuals in their sources, with NotebookLM even providing citations to relevant images as supporting evidence in its responses.
Google plans to integrate the Gemini Pro model into other products, like its Bard chatbot, and offer it via the Vertex AI service. This will allow other companies to incorporate this AI model into their applications.
The global rollout of NotebookLM will likely pit it directly against the dozens of platforms, mostly startups, that currently let users leverage generative AI tools to do things like answer their questions and summarize PDFs. Most of these platforms charge for their services, but Google's scale is allowing it to offer this service for free.
However, NotebookLM differentiates itself by being grounded in the user's own documents and sources. This source-grounding architecture reduces the risk of the AI model “hallucinating” or generating biased or incorrect information, which is a common issue with other AI chatbots.
By restricting the AI to only the data the user provides, NotebookLM creates a personalized AI research assistant that is an expert in the information most relevant to the individual user. This makes it a powerful tool for authors, students, educators, and professionals across various fields.
To start using NotebookLM, users simply need to create a notebook for their specific project and upload relevant documents like articles, notes, transcripts etc. They can then read, take notes, and organize their ideas within the app.
NotebookLM provides insights by allowing users to ask questions about their uploaded documents. It can also automatically generate useful content like summaries, tables of contents, FAQs, briefing docs or study guides based on the provided sources.
The AI assistant cites the uploaded sources in its responses, enabling users to easily fact-check the information or dive deeper into the original context. With the addition of inline citations, this process is now even more seamless.
As an experimental product from Google Labs, NotebookLM is still evolving based on user feedback. The team is focused on making it a truly useful product while also ensuring the responsible development of AI in alignment with Google's AI Principles.
The expanded global availability of NotebookLM in over 200 countries and support for more than 100 languages democratizes access to this powerful AI tool. It empowers people worldwide to harness the potential of artificial intelligence for faster learning, research, and content creation, all while maintaining privacy and mitigating risks.
With the integration of the state-of-the-art Gemini 1.5 Pro model and new features like multimodal understanding, NotebookLM is set to redefine the landscape of AI-assisted note-taking and knowledge management on a global scale. As more users adopt this free tool in their workflows, its impact on productivity and innovation across industries could be transformative.
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