Google expands AI research assistant, NotebookLM to over 200 countries and territories

Tech giant, Google has announced that it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries. The list of countries that NotebookLM now supports includes Nigeria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India and the United Kingdom as well as 208 other countries and territories.

The company also announced that drawing from its Gemini 1.5 Pro, NotebookLM has also been upgraded with new features and languages to help more people use AI to generate summaries and ask questions based on their documents.

Google has also broadened the interface language support for the AI-assisted app to 108 languages, including Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Cantonese, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi and Hinglish. It also supports sources and chats in 38 languages, such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Spanish.

Commenting, Steven Johnson, editorial director, Google Labs & Raiza Martin, Product Manager, Google Labs, said that the goal from the beginning with NotebookLM has been to create a tool to help you understand and explore complex material, make new connections from information, and get to your first draft faster.

“Thanks to Gemini 1.5 Pro’s native multimodal capabilities, you can now ask questions about images, charts and diagrams in your Slides or Docs. NotebookLM will even include citations to images as supporting evidence when relevant”, Johnson said.

NotebookLM was first unveiled as a project idea at last year’s Google I/O event and it was made available to a select few users beginning from June of the same year.

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 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, like ChatGPT, which often does not adhere to the source users provide and generates information based on the data used for its training that sometimes can be unrelated or wrong.

Below is a summary of the major updates announced by Google yesterday:

• NotebookLM now supports Google Slides and web URLs as sources, along with Google Docs, PDFs and text files.
• Inline citations now take you directly to supporting passages in your sources, so you can easily fact-check the AI response or dive deeper into the original text.
• Notebook guide gives you a high-level understanding of your sources by converting them into useful formats like FAQs, Briefing Docs or Study Guides.

Also, thanks to Gemini 1.5 Pro’s native multimodal capabilities, users can now ask questions about images, charts and diagrams in the sources. NotebookLM will also include citations to images as supporting evidence when relevant.

Uses cases of Google’s NotebookLM

Johnson said the team is amazed by the diverse range of uses that have used NotebookLM over the past year and the projects that they have used it to create. “We have been amazed by the range of uses that people are finding for NotebookLM”, he said.

For instance, he indicated that best-selling author Walter Isaacson has been working with NotebookLM to analyze Marie Curie’s journals for research on his next book. Other cases cited include:

• In local governance, Palm Bay resident Thomas Gaume created a hyperlocal newsletter, aggregating city ordinances, land use data, zoning codes and council meeting minutes. NotebookLM empowered him to be a “one-person newsroom and publisher.”
• NotebookLM’s ability to summarize and adapt interview transcripts helps users identify patterns and themes in raw transcripts, saving hours of manual analysis. For example, consultant Victor Adefuye uses NotebookLM to analyze sales call transcripts for targeted training and coaching.
• Nonprofits have deployed NotebookLM to help them identify needs in underserved communities and organize information for grant proposals.
• Some unexpected and playful use cases with the help of our 14,000-member Discord community, including novelists and fan-fiction authors managing complex storylines using NotebookLM, and our favourite: role-playing game enthusiasts consulting detailed descriptions of fantasy worlds for games like Dungeons and Dragons.

He noted that the AI tool was developed with authors, students and educators, and the company saw early adopters integrating its source-grounding architecture into their research and writing workflows.

He added that Google has also included inline citation features to help users look up supporting passages in their sources, fact-check AI-generated responses, and read the original text for more context.

At its Google I/O 2024 keynote in May, Google showed off an early prototype of the NotebookLM that uses the company’s Gemini model to scan through the uploaded materials and generate an audio discussion.

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