Many of us have a place where we feel like we do our best thinking — maybe outside on a walk, or at the kitchen table sipping a cup of coffee. It’s where we organize our thoughts to articulate messages, accomplish goals and make connections. And wherever we happen to do it, that thinking process almost always involves taking ideas from different tools and sources — whether quotes from books, instructions from websites or handwritten musings from notebooks — and combining them into new forms.
Large language models (LLMs) have given us an extraordinary opportunity to reimagine that process. With the advanced capabilities of LLMs, you can have more than just an organizational tool — you can have a personalized AI collaborator.
NotebookLM, an experimental product in Labs designed to help you do your best thinking, is now available in the U.S. to ages 18 and up. And it’s starting to use Gemini Pro, our best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks, to help with document understanding and reasoning.
Feedback from early testers
We opened up early access to NotebookLM in July, giving testers the chance to try out its source grounding capabilities. That means when you upload documents to NotebookLM, it becomes an instant expert in the information you need for your projects, capable of answering questions based on the supplied sources. Since then, we’ve talked to knowledge workers, creators, students and educators to learn more about the ways they’re using (and what they’re liking about) NotebookLM.
Through those conversations, we‘ve discovered that people particularly appreciate the way NotebookLM automatically generates summaries and suggests follow-up questions, providing a helpful new way to comprehend difficult text and synthesize connections between multiple documents.
Today’s NotebookLM release builds on that foundation, introducing more than a dozen new features that allow you to shift effortlessly from reading to note-taking to writing. Here are a few highlights.
A new space to take and reference notes
One key feature request was the ability to save interesting exchanges with NotebookLM as notes. So we’ve introduced a new noteboard space where you can easily pin quotes from the chat, excerpts from your sources or your own written notes. Like before, NotebookLM automatically shares citations from your sources whenever it answers a question. But now you can quickly jump from a citation to the source, letting you see the quote in its original context.