Google has decided it is time their AI notetaking assistant, NotebookLM, stopped lounging in beta and began pulling some actual weight. The company announced that the tool is now powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, which apparently means it can now understand your rambling documents and awkwardly phrased prompts with slightly more precision and slightly fewer digital eye-rolls.
This AI assistant with aspirations of academic excellence is no longer just an experiment in lab coats. NotebookLM is being released in the UK, Australia, Canada and beyond, thus expanding its reach across the English-speaking world where students and writers alike might welcome an AI that remembers what they told it five minutes ago without constantly asking for clarification.
The AI now allows users to upload up to 50 sources per project, which is either a generous amount or a cry for help, depending on how deeply into PhD-level research you are. Each source can be up to 500,000 words long, which means, theoretically, you could force Gemini to read ‘War and Peace’ roughly seven and a half times before it politely curls up and dies.
Google is enamored with the idea of “source-grounding,” which is their charming term for making sure the AI does not go entirely off-book when answering your questions. Every quote or answer is cited and linked to the original source, presumably to give students something to pretend to have read when they’re racing to meet a deadline.
Other new features include Notebook Guide which takes your uploads and turns them into bite-sized summaries, FAQs, or study guides. In effect, this is the adult version of asking your smarter friend to explain the entire textbook one hour before the exam and hoping they do not charge a tutoring fee.
Google says NotebookLM has already been piloted by filmmakers, authors and students who all found the AI useful, though none have stepped forward to clarify how often it hallucinated entire plots or tried to suggest that Shakespeare was a time traveler.
All in all, Google’s AI scribe is now cleverly cloaked in Gemini and claiming to be your tireless research assistant, though one suspects it still draws the line at writing your thesis or attending your 9 a.m. lecture.
Finally, a notebook that never forgets and only occasionally invents sources out of thin air.