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 primarily based on their paperwork.
The record of nations that NotebookLM now helps consists of 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, reminiscent of Arabic, Bengali, Chinese language (simplified and conventional), Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Spanish.
NotebookLM, first demoed as Challenge Tailwind at Google I/O in 2023, was initially accessible 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 conventional AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, which regularly doesn’t adhere to the supply customers present and generates data primarily based on the info used for its coaching that generally will be unrelated or improper.
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 concerning 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 Preserve. Nonetheless, Raiza Martin, senior product supervisor for AI at Google Labs, advised TechCrunch in a digital roundtable earlier this week that Google needed to give attention to the product’s core worth earlier than increasing integrations.
“Down the street, you’ll hopefully see most of these integrations,” she mentioned.
Google has additionally added inline citations that can assist 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 situated beneath the responses the assistant generated.
It additionally comes with Pocket book Information, which helps convert your content material into numerous codecs, reminiscent of 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, creating 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.
“Specifically, we get this query quite a bit as a result of customers need to have the ability to use it with work or faculty paperwork,” she mentioned. “Your knowledge does keep non-public to you.”
At its Google I/O 2024 keynote in Could, Google showed off an early prototype of Audio Overviews for NotebookLM that makes use of the corporate’s Gemini mannequin to scan by way of the uploaded supplies and generate a podcast-esque dialogue. Gemini 1.5 Professional additionally lets NotebookLM have up to 50 sources in every pocket book, with 500,000 phrases per supply.
The worldwide rollout of NotebookLM will probably pit it immediately in opposition to 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. Most of those platforms cost for his or her companies, however Google’s heft is permitting it to supply this service without cost.