Google said Thursday that it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI note-taking assistant, to more than 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the US. enhanced with new features and languages to help more people use AI to generate summaries and ask questions based on their documents.
The list of countries that NotebookLM now supports includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India and the UK, as well as 208 other countries and territories. Google has also expanded the interface language support for the AI-assisted app to 108 languages, including Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Cantonese, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi and English. It also supports feeds and chats in 38 languages, such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese and Spanish.
NotebookLM, first shown as Project Tailwind at Google I/O in 2023, was initially available to select users in June of 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, such as ChatGPT, which often does not stick to the feed that users provide and generates information based on the data used to train it, which can sometimes be unrelated or wrong.
Google is also giving NotebookLM the ability to fetch content from Google Slides and web URLs, in addition to existing support for Google Docs, PDFs, and text files. This allows users to create annotations or ask questions about the content (whether it is an image or text) in their documents or explore material online.
Some early users of NotebookLM in the US predicted that it would support traditional note-taking apps, including Evernote and Google Keep. However, Raiza Martin, senior product manager for AI at Google Labs, told TechCrunch in a virtual roundtable earlier this week that Google wanted to focus on the core value of the product before expanding integrations.
“Down the road, you’ll hopefully see these types of integrations,” she said.
Google has also added internal citations to help you view supporting passages in your sources, check AI-generated answers, and read the original text for more context. Previously, citations were located below the answers that the assistant generated.
It also comes with Notebook Guide which helps in converting your content to different formats such as . FAQs, informational documents or study guides.
Google Labs editorial director Steven Johnson said NotebookLM was developed with authors, students and educators in mind, and the company saw early adopters integrate its source-based architecture into their research and writing workflows.
The company said NotebookLM has also been used to create hyperlocal newsletters, compile interview transcripts, develop grant proposals, or even manage descriptions of fantasy worlds.
Martin noted that Google doesn’t use any of the data users upload to NotebookLM to train 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 said. “Your data remains private to you.”
At its Google I/O 2024 keynote in May, Google showed off an early prototype of Audio Summaries for NotebookLM that uses the company’s Gemini model to scan uploaded materials and generate a podcast-based discussion. Gemini 1.5 Pro also allows NotebookLM to have up to 50 sources in each notebook, with 500,000 words per source.
NotebookLM’s global rollout likely puts it head-to-head with dozens of platforms (read startups) that currently allow users to use GenAI tools to do things like answer their own questions and summarize PDFs. Most of these platforms charge for their services, but Google’s move is allowing it to offer this service for free.
