Google launches NotebookLM powered by Gemini Pro, drops waitlist

At I/O 2023 in May, Google demoed an “AI-first notebook” that was originally called Project Tailwind. NotebookLM is now seeing a general release in the US, and – like Bard – will now be powered by Gemini Pro. 

Google has “talked to knowledge workers, creators, students, and educators to learn more about the ways they’re using (and what they’re liking about) NotebookLM” since early access opened in July. Users like the auto-generated summaries and suggested follow-up questions that provide a “helpful new way to comprehend difficult text and synthesize connections between multiple documents.”

Gemini Pro is specifically used for document understanding and reasoning, but PaLM 2 and other models are also being leveraged.

With today’s launch, NotebookLM is adding a dozen new features over the coming weeks. A “Noteboard” that appears above the chat box with a card-based grid UI will let you save NotebookLM responses, excerpts from your sources, and any notes you’ve written.

You can select multiple notes and prompt NotebookLM to summarize, combine into a single note, create an outline, study guide, or something broader, like turning “your notes into an email newsletter, a script outline, a draft of a marketing plan.” There’s also a shortcut to export to Google Docs.

Meanwhile, NotebookLM will “dynamically suggest actions based on whatever you happen to be doing”: 

• ”…when you select a passage while reading a source, NotebookLM will automatically offer to summarize the text to a new note, or help you understand technical language or complicated ideas.”
• “…while you’re writing a note, NotebookLM will offer tools to polish or refine your prose, or suggest related ideas from your sources based on what you’ve just written.”

NotebookLM now lets you select sources (from the sidebar) to chat specifically with just those information sets, while Google is increasing the per source notebook limit to 100.  

Other usability updates let you hide the source and quickly jump from a citation to the source. These new features are rolling out over the coming weeks following the Gemini Pro launch.

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