NotebookLM: Google’s AI-powered notes app is launching right now

Challenge Tailwind, the AI-backed note-taking instrument that Google launched at this yr’s I/O developer convention, is rebranding. It’s now often called NotebookLM, and it’s launching right now to “a small group of customers within the US,” in accordance with a Google weblog put up. (The LM stands for Language Mannequin as a result of Google actually needs to be sure to don’t neglect about all of the AI in right here.) The product hasn’t modified, although: Google’s nonetheless attempting to present customers their very own private AI, skilled on their information and notes and capable of assist them make sense of all of it.

The core of NotebookLM appears to truly begin in Google Docs. (“We’ll be including extra codecs quickly,” the weblog put up says.) When you get entry to the app, you’ll have the ability to choose a bunch of docs after which use NotebookLM to ask questions on them and even create new stuff with them.

Google provides a number of concepts for stuff you would possibly do in NotebookLM, corresponding to routinely summarizing an extended doc or turning a video define right into a script. Google’s examples, even again at I/O, appeared primarily geared towards college students: you would possibly ask for a abstract of your class notes for the week or for NotebookLM to inform you all the things you’ve discovered in regards to the Peloponnesian Conflict this semester.

These are the sorts of options you’ll hear about in virtually any AI product, however Google is hoping that by limiting the underlying mannequin solely to the data you’ve added your self, it could possibly each enhance the mannequin’s responses and assist mitigate its tendency to confidently lie about all the things. (Google’s not distinctive on this concept, both: Dropbox, Mem, Notion, and lots of others are pursuing related hyper-specific AI instruments of their very own.) NotebookLM additionally has citations inbuilt, which ought to make it simpler to shortly fact-check the routinely generated responses. However Google does warn that NotebookLM would possibly nonetheless hallucinate and that the mannequin gained’t at all times get it proper. It additionally, after all, is determined by the data you present — in the event you wrote down the unsuitable dates for the Peloponnesian Conflict in school, it could possibly’t show you how to.

Google says that the NotebookLM mannequin solely has entry to the paperwork you select to add and that your information is neither out there to others neither is it used to coach new AI fashions. This is without doubt one of the trickiest elements of a product like this: Google is asking customers to present their personal info to an AI mannequin in alternate for some handy and helpful options, and that tradeoff will get extra difficult the extra delicate the data turns into.

Which may be why Google is beginning small. NotebookLM remains to be solely accessible through a waitlist in Google Labs, and the introductory weblog put up reiterates a number of occasions that the product remains to be in its infancy. However simply because the Search Generative Expertise has the potential to reshape Google Search, don’t be shocked if NotebookLM seems to be loads just like the long-term way forward for Google Drive.