Google announced significant upgrades to its AI-powered note-taking and research assistant, NotebookLM, on Thursday, aiming to deliver a smarter and more personalized experience for users. This update primarily focuses on the highly anticipated audio overview feature, allowing users to more precisely guide the AI-generated dialogue content towards specific topics, rather than just generating comprehensive audio summaries.
Since its launch last month, NotebookLM's audio overview feature has quickly gained popularity due to its podcast-like AI-generated dialogue format. Many users have begun sharing audio summaries based on their own content (including diaries and notes) on social media. Although Google has not disclosed specific data, website traffic analysis platform SimilarWeb shows that NotebookLM's monthly visits surged by 371% in September, reaching 3.07 million, a significant increase from the previous month's 652,000.
The core of this update is to allow users to customize the audio overview. Google has added a "Customize" control option next to the existing "Generate" button, enabling users to provide instructions to the AI host to guide the dialogue towards specific content points. Raiza Martin, the product head of NotebookLM, stated that this update allows users to direct the AI dialogue according to their own needs.
In addition to the customization options, Google has also added a background listening feature for audio overviews. Users can continue working in NotebookLM, searching for information, obtaining references, and exploring related citations while listening to audio.
NotebookLM made its debut as a project at last year's Google I/O developer conference and was publicly launched in the United States in December of the same year. In June of this year, it expanded to over 200 countries, including India and the UK. Although the product was initially mainly applied in the fields of education and research, with Google's support for more resources and the addition of new features, businesses and organizations have also begun to try it out.
Currently, over 80,000 organizations are using NotebookLM. To further expand the commercial market, Google launched the NotebookLM Business Edition pilot program on Thursday. Enterprises can apply to participate in the pilot, and once approved, they will be able to experience new features in advance and receive training and email support.
Martin revealed that during the commercial pilot program, they will guide organizations on how to use NotebookLM, and they also hope that businesses can provide feedback on the features they need. The official release and pricing of NotebookLM Business Edition will be announced later this year, but the specific timeline and pricing tiers have not yet been determined.
Currently, NotebookLM's monthly visits have reached 4.17 million, with 2.5 million from desktop devices and 1.6 million from mobile devices. Although there is no dedicated mobile application yet, Martin stated that the team is actively exploring native mobile experiences to expand NotebookLM's influence among smartphone users. Additionally, they are researching adding more voices, languages, and control options for audio overviews.
Last month, NotebookLM added YouTube videos and audio files as source materials for generating summaries, alongside existing sources such as Google Drive, URLs, PDFs, and text. Martin stated that PDFs and YouTube videos are currently the two most popular source materials.
This update not only showcases Google's continuous innovation in the field of AI applications but also reflects the company's keen insight into user needs. With the continuous improvement of NotebookLM's features and the upcoming launch of the commercial version, we have reason to expect this AI assistant to play a greater role in enhancing work efficiency and promoting knowledge management.