Google’s NotebookLM just got better with new features. The company announced on their blog that you can now upload YouTube videos and audio files to your notebooks. The tool then summarizes key points so you don’t have to listen to the whole thing.
Also, there’s a new way to share Audio Overviews through generating a public link. It’s all designed to make research and studying a lot easier.
NotebookLM is now an all-in-one information organizer
NotebookLM is a Google tool that helps you better understand and organize information. You can upload different content types, including PDFs, and websites. Recently, Google announced an update to the tool that now supports YouTube videos and audio files.
Once uploaded, NotebookLM uses artificial intelligence (AI) to outline, analyze, and make connections within your material. This way, it’s simple to create study guides, find important parts in videos or audio, and compare different perspectives on a topic, all while keeping track of the sources and providing citations. You can see how I use the tool to sum up a YouTube video explaining how to use NotebookLM in the featured images.
Let’s say you’re helping your kids with their homework on identifying plants. You find a YouTube video that explains different types and paste the link into NotebookLM. The tool will summarize all what the video discusses.
Now, you can click specific points in the summary, which link directly to the parts of the video where those points are discussed, instead of painfully sitting through a long video. You can even ask questions on unclear subjects using the chat feature.
The capable Gemini 1.5 powers NotebookLM
Google has also made it possible to share Audio Overviews, the AI-generated summaries of audio files, directly in NotebookLM. Simply click “share” when an Overview is ready and you’ll make a public link to share the brief with others. Currently, any individual user of NotebookLM can use the Audio Overview feature.
However, Google Workspace users do not yet have the ability. That means I’m personal Google accounts and non-Workspace users can access and utilize this feature, while those using Workspace for business or educational purposes cannot share yet. The tool is still in its experimental phase.
NotebookLM is powered by Gemini 1.5, an advanced AI model from Google introduced in February 2024. It supports multimodal capabilities, allowing it to analyze videos, audio files, PDFs, Google Docs, images, and more. What’s really impressive is its ability to handle long contexts. It can process up to one million tokens at once, and take in a ton of information in a single prompt.
NotebookLM won’t steal your data, says Google
The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) setup on Gemini 1.5 causes it to use a network of smaller, specialized neural networks instead of relying on a single large one. So when the model processes information, it can trigger only the most relevant networks for the specific task at hand, making it more efficient.
You may have trust issues concerning your data. But Google has also promised that NotebookLM doesn’t use your personal data to train the AI, and your information is private. So, if you’re working on a sensitive business proposal, a personal journal entry, or secret projects, your data stays private and won’t be shared or stored without your consent.
