Google’s AI-powered note-taking app is now available to all users in the US who are at least 18 years old, the company said. Announce Friday. The beta app is also getting a slew of new features and starts using Gemini Pro, Google’s new large language model, to “help with document understanding and reasoning.”
Once documents are uploaded to NotebookLM, the app can automatically generate summaries and suggest follow-up questions about the content in the documents. Unlike general chatbots that rely on large amounts of irrelevant information, NotebookLM only focuses on the documents they are fed.
Now, Google is adding new capabilities to the product to go beyond just creating summaries and suggesting questions.
NotebookLM now has new tools designed to help users organize their formatted notes into structured writing projects. For example, you can select a set of notes and have NotebookLM create something new, such as a text outline, an email newsletter, or a draft marketing plan.
Additionally, NotebookLM can now suggest actions based on what you’re currently doing. For example, suppose you select a passage while reading the source. NotebookLM will automatically offer to summarize the text you selected in a new note or help you understand the content of the text. In another case, let’s say you’re writing a note. NotebookLM will offer to improve your prose or suggest related ideas from your sources based on what you’ve written so far.
The tech giant is adding a new space on the Notes Pad to let you easily pin quotes from chat or your written notes. Google says the new space was a major request from users who said they wanted the ability to save their exchanges with NotebookLM as notes.
Google is also making some other small tweaks to the product. Now, when you add a note, NotebookLM will create a new, standalone note instead of adding it to a single notebook. When you click on the quote number in a chat reply or in a saved note, you will be instantly taken to the original quote in the source.
If you want to focus exclusively on taking notes, you can now hide the source. And if you want to focus NotebookLM’s AI on specific sources, you can chat with a specific group of sources in your notebook by selecting them individually in the source sidebar. Additionally, Google is adding PDF support and copied text support, which means you can now copy and paste text to create a new source and edit the title once it’s created.
In addition to the new features, Google is also expanding the product limitations, with Notebooks can now include up to 20 sources, while a source can now include up to 200,000 words.
Today’s announcement comes about five months after the tech giant made NotebookLM available to a small number of people. Google first demonstrated the “AI Notebook for Everyone” during Google I/O earlier this year under the name Project Tailwind before renaming it to NotebookLM. At the time, Google said the app could be used by students as a way to organize lecture notes and other documents as they complete coursework.
NotebookLM is promising, but as TechCrunch’s Devin Coldeway previously pointed out, let’s hope the product doesn’t end up in the Google Graveyard like so many of the tech giant’s other experimental projects.