Google announced on Thursday the global expansion of NotebookLM, an AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries. This comes after six months of initially launching in the United States. The updated platform, powered by Google’s advanced LLM Gemini 1.5 Pro, now offers added features and language support, making it accessible to a wider range of users looking to utilize AI in their document organization and research processes.
The list of countries now supported by NotebookLM includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the U.K., along with 208 other countries and territories. In addition, the interface language options have been expanded to a total of 108, including languages like Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Cantonese, and German. Users can also access sources and chat in 38 languages such as Arabic, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Dutch, and Japanese.
NotebookLM, originally known as Project Tailwind, was first previewed at Google I/O in 2023 and was initially only available to a select group of users in June of last year. The AI-powered assistant uses advanced technology to help users generate summaries and answer questions based on their documents, notes, and other uploaded sources. Unlike traditional AI chatbots that can often produce unrelated or incorrect information, NotebookLM stays true to the source material provided by the user.
Google has also enhanced NotebookLM by allowing it to source content from Google Slides and web URLs, adding to its previous support for Google Docs, PDFs, and text files. This allows users to create notes or ask questions based on any type of content within their documents, as well as explore material online.
Early users of NotebookLM in the U.S. had hoped for integration with popular note-taking apps such as Evernote and Google Keep. However, senior product manager for AI at Google Labs, Raiza Martin, explained that the focus has been 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 made improvements to NotebookLM, including adding inline citations for supporting passages in sources, fact-checking AI-generated responses, and providing original text for more context. These citations were previously located below the responses generated by the assistant.
The updated version also comes with Notebook Guide, a feature that assists in converting content into various formats such as FAQs, briefing documents, or study guides.
Steven Johnson, editorial director for Google Labs, highlighted that NotebookLM was developed with authors, students, and educators in mind. The team has already seen early adopters using the platform to enhance their research and writing workflows.
The company clarified that no user data is used to train the algorithms in NotebookLM. Martin stated, “In particular, we get this question a lot because users want to be able to use it with work or school documents. Your data does stay private to you.”
At the Google I/O keynote in 2024, the company demonstrated an early prototype for Audio Overviews, a feature that utilizes Google’s Gemini model to scan uploaded materials and generate a podcast-like discussion. NotebookLM also benefits from Gemini 1.5 Pro’s ability to accommodate up to 50 sources in each notebook, with a maximum of 500,000 words per source.
The global expansion of NotebookLM will likely heighten competition with other platforms that offer AI tools for tasks like answering questions and summarizing PDFs. While many of these platforms charge for their services, Google’s considerable resources allow it to offer NotebookLM for free.
