Nearly six months after granting access in the United States, Google on Thursday announced it is introducing NotebookLM, an AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 more nations. The platform, powered by Google’s multimodal LLM Gemini 1.5 Pro, has also been improved with additional languages and capabilities to allow more users to use AI to create summaries and ask questions depending on their documents.
Along with 208 other countries and territories, the list of nations NotebookLM currently supports includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. In addition, Google has expanded the interface language compatibility for the AI-assisted app to 108 languages—Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Cantonese, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, and Hinglish. The app is available in 38 languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, and Spanish.
In June of last year, NotebookLM, initially introduced as Project Tailwind at Google I/O in 2023, became available to a limited number of users. It generates summaries and answers questions from papers, transcripts, notes, and other uploaded sources using artificial intelligence. This is unlike a conventional artificial intelligence chatbot like ChatGPT, which often does not follow the sources users offer and provides information based on its training data, which may sometimes be unconnected or incorrect. 
Apart from the already-provided support for Google Docs, PDFs, and text files, Google is also enabling NotebookLM to obtain material from Google Slides and web URLs. The content, whether text or images, helps users take notes, pose inquiries in their papers, or explore online resources.
Some early NotebookLM users in the United States expected it would support conventional note-taking applications such as Evernote and Google Keep. But Raiza Martin, senior product manager for artificial intelligence at Google Labs, told Eltrys in a virtual roundtable earlier this week that Google intended to emphasise the fundamental value of the product before extending integrations.
“You should ideally see these kinds of integrations down the road,” she added.
Google has now included inline citations so that you can review supporting sections in your sources, fact-check AI-generated comments, and read the original text for further background. The assistant’s reply used to be accompanied by citations.
Along with it is a notebook guide that will enable you to translate your material into other forms, like study guides, FAQs, and briefing materials.
Image Credits: Google
According to Steven Johnson, editorial director of Google Labs, the company saw early users incorporating NotebookLM’s source-grounding architecture into their research and writing processes.
The company said that it has also used NotebookLM for the development of grant applications, hyperlocal newsletters, transcript summaries, and even fantasy world management.
Martin pointed out that Google does not use any of the data consumers provide in NotebookLM to feed its algorithms.
“We especially get this question a lot because users want to be able to use it with work or school records,” she added. Your data does remain personal to you.
Using its Gemini model to analyse the supplied documents and create a podcast-esque conversation, Google displayed an early version of Audio Overviews for NotebookLM during its Google I/O 2024 keynote in May. With 500,000 words per source, Gemini 1.5 Pro additionally enables NotebookLM to contain up to 50 sources in each notebook.
The global rollout of NotebookLM is likely to position it directly against numerous platforms and companies that utilise GenAI technologies to perform tasks such as answering inquiries and summarising PDFs. While most of these sites charge for their offerings, Google’s heft enables them to provide this free tool.
