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Google’s AI Notes app is now available to all users 18 and older in the United States, the company announced Friday. The experimental app also adds a number of new features and begins using Google’s new large-scale language model, Gemini Pro, to “help understand and reason about documents.”
When you upload a document to NotebookLM, the app automatically generates a summary and suggests follow-up questions about the document’s content. Unlike typical chatbots that consume a lot of irrelevant information, NotebookLM focuses only on the documents that are fed to it.
Google is currently adding new features to the product that go beyond generating summaries and suggesting questions.
NotebookLM now has new tools designed to help users organize their curated notes into structured writing projects. For example, you can select a set of notes and ask NotebookLM to create a new one, such as a script outline, an email newsletter, or a draft marketing plan.
Additionally, NotebookLM can now suggest actions based on what the user is currently doing. For example, suppose you select a passage while reading a source. NotebookLM automatically suggests summarizing the selected text into a new note or helping you understand the content of the text. In another example, let’s say you’re writing a memo. NotebookLM offers suggestions to refine your prose or suggest related ideas from sources based on what you’ve written so far.
The tech giant is adding a new noteboard space that makes it easy to pin quotes from chats or notes you’ve written yourself. According to Google, the new space was a key request from users who wanted the ability to save their interactions with NotebookLM as notes.
Google has made a few other small tweaks to the product. When you add a note, NotebookLM creates a new independent note instead of adding it to a single notepad. Additionally, clicking on the quote number in a chat response or saved note will immediately display the original quote in the source.
If you just want to focus on taking notes, you can hide the source. Additionally, if you want to focus NotebookLM’s AI on selected sources, you can chat with a specific set of sources in your notebook by selecting individual sources in the sources sidebar. Additionally, Google is adding his PDF support and support for copied text. This means you can now copy and paste text to create a new source and edit the title after creation.
In addition to new features, Google is also expanding product limits, with notebooks now able to contain up to 20 sources, and sources can now contain up to 200,000 words. Ta.
Today’s announcement comes about five months after the tech giant made NotebookLM available to a select few. Google first demoed “AI notebooks for everyone” at his Google I/O earlier this year as Project Tailwind, later renamed to NotebookLM. At the time, Google said the app could be used by students as a way to organize lecture notes and other documents as they complete their coursework.
NotebookLM is promising, but as TechCrunch’s Devin Caldeway previously pointed out, we hope it doesn’t end up in Google’s grave like many of the tech giant’s other experimental projects.