Google Releases Gemini Pro-Powered NotebookLM in the U.S.

Google on Friday announced that NotebookLM, its experimental AI-powered note-taking app, is now available to customers in the United States.

“With the advanced capabilities of LLMs, you can have more than just an organizational tool — you can have a personalized AI collaborator,” Google’s Steven Johnson and Raiza Martin write in the announcement post. “NotebookLM, an experimental product in Labs designed to help you do your best thinking, is now available in the U.S. to ages 18 and up. And it’s starting to use Gemini Pro, our best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks, to help with document understanding and reasoning.”

Google released NotebookLM in preview in July with a waiting list, but the note-taking app is now available generally and adds some new features. (And it appears to work with both Gmail and Google Workspace accounts.) It provides a Google Keep-like interface, with top-level notebooks that contain one or more notes and sources (Google Docs documents, PDF files, text, and so on). But what sets it apart from Keep is that NotebookLM will generate summaries of sources, and you can ask it questions about those sources.

“When you upload documents to NotebookLM, it becomes an instant expert in the information you need for your projects, capable of answering questions based on the supplied sources,” Google explains. “We’ve talked to knowledge workers, creators, students, and educators to learn more about the ways they’re using (and what they’re liking about) NotebookLM. Through those conversations, we‘ve discovered that people particularly appreciate the way NotebookLM automatically generates summaries and suggests follow-up questions, providing a helpful new way to comprehend difficult text and synthesize connections between multiple documents.”

New features in the public release include an increased source limit (to 20 per notebook), an increased word count (to 200,000 words per source), the ability to write notes independently of notebooks, a new Noteboard space above the chat box for pinning written and saved notes, the ability to save chat responses as notes (with citations retained), the ability jump to a citation in a note by clicking its citation number in a chat, and more. The Google Support site has the complete list, and notes that several more features—suggested actions, one-click note combining, summaries for multiple notes, and more—are coming next week.

You can check out NotebookLM on the NotebookLM website.