Google on Thursday mentioned 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 folks use AI to generate summaries and ask questions based mostly on their paperwork.
The checklist of nations that NotebookLM now helps contains Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the U.Okay., in addition to 208 different international locations and territories. Google has additionally broadened the interface language help 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 out there 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 not like a standard AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, which regularly doesn’t adhere to the supply customers present and generates data based mostly on the info used for its coaching that typically could be unrelated or fallacious.
Google can be giving NotebookLM the power to supply content material from Google Slides and net URLs, along with the prevailing help for Google Docs, PDFs and textual content recordsdata. This lets customers create notes or ask questions in regards to 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 help conventional note-taking apps, together with Evernote and Google Maintain. Nevertheless, Raiza Martin, senior product supervisor for AI at Google Labs, instructed TechCrunch in a digital roundtable earlier this week that Google wished to deal with the product’s core worth earlier than increasing integrations.
“Down the road, you’ll hopefully see these types of integrations,” she mentioned.
Google has additionally added inline citations that will help you have a look at supporting passages in your sources, fact-check AI-generated responses, and skim the unique textual content for extra context. Beforehand, citations had been positioned under the responses the assistant generated.
It additionally comes with Pocket book Information, which helps convert your content material into numerous codecs, equivalent to FAQs, briefing paperwork or examine guides.
Google Labs’ editorial director, Steven Johnson, mentioned 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 mentioned 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 mentioned. “Your data does stay private to you.”
At its Google I/O 2024 keynote in Might, Google confirmed off an early prototype of Audio Overviews for NotebookLM that makes use of the corporate’s Gemini mannequin to scan by means 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 seemingly pit it immediately towards the handfuls of platforms (learn startups) that at the moment 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 providers, however Google’s heft is permitting it to supply this service without spending a dime.
