In 2023, Google introduced NotebookLM, an AI-powered research and writing assistant. Today, Google is pleased to share an upgraded version of NotebookLM — now using Gemini 1.5 Pro — to over 200 countries and territories around the world.
According to the tech giant, the goal from the beginning with NotebookLM has been to create a tool to help users understand and explore complex material, make new connections from information, and get to your first draft faster.
You can upload sources — your research notes, interview transcripts, corporate documents — and instantly NotebookLM becomes an expert in the material that matters most to you.
The recent upgrade introduces several new features:
- NotebookLM now supports Google Slides and web URLs as sources, along with Google Docs, PDFs and text files.
- Inline citations now take you directly to supporting passages in your sources, so you can easily fact-check the AI response or dive deeper in the original text.
- Notebook guide gives you a high-level understanding of your sources by converting them into useful formats like FAQs, Briefing Docs or Study Guides.
Thanks to Gemini 1.5 Pro’s native multimodal capabilities, you can now ask questions about images, charts and diagrams in your sources. NotebookLM will even include citations to images as supporting evidence when relevant.
With Gemini 1.5 Pro’s native multimodal capabilities, NotebookLM can now understand and cite your questions about images, charts and diagrams in your sources.
Case studies from real users
Google has been amazed by the range of uses that people are finding for NotebookLM. Because the product was developed in close partnership with authors, students and educators as many early adopters integrate it into research and writing workflows.
Best-selling author Walter Isaacson has been working with NotebookLM to analyze Marie Curie’s journals for research on his next book.
Similar enthusiasm from documentary and podcast researchers who need to sift through complex archives to generate scripts or story ideas have also been observed, but the combination of Gemini 1.5 Pro’s advanced reasoning abilities and NotebookLM’s source-grounding architecture has unlocked many other potential applications:
- In local governance, Palm Bay resident Thomas Gaume created a hyperlocal newsletter, aggregating city ordinances, land use data, zoning codes and council meeting minutes. NotebookLM empowered him to be a “one-person newsroom and publisher.”
- NotebookLM’s ability to summarize and adapt interview transcripts is helping users identify patterns and themes in raw transcripts, saving hours of manual analysis. For example, consultant Victor Adefuye uses the platform to analyze sales call transcripts for targeted training and coaching.
- Nonprofits have deployed it to help them identify needs in underserved communities and organize information for grant proposals.
Google also noticed some unexpected and playful use cases with the help of our 14,000 member Discord community, including novelists and fan-fiction authors managing complex storylines using NotebookLM, and our favorite: role-playing game enthusiasts consulting detailed descriptions of fantasy worlds for games like Dungeons and Dragons.
Getting started
If you’re new to NotebookLM, getting started is easy: When you first access it, you’ll create a notebook and upload documents for a specific project or deliverable.
At that point you can read, take notes, ask questions, organize your ideas, or ask it to create automatic overviews of all your sources — a study guide, for example, or a table of contents. And with it, the sources you upload are not used to train the model.
Whether it’s being used to build imaginary worlds, write bestselling biographies, or help salespeople find new customers, NotebookLM has given U.S. users powerful tools for making connections and generating insights out of large collections of documents. We can’t wait to see what the rest of the world does with it.
Don’t miss important articles during the week. Subscribe to techbuild.africa weekly digest for updates
