Summary
- NotebookLM is getting a massive upgrade with Gemini 1.5 Pro, offering free access to powerful AI capabilities for academic research.
- The new version allows for more external sources, larger context windows, and up to 25 million words of data for study guides and FAQs.
- Google is expanding NotebookLM’s availability to over 200 regions, signaling a potential move towards mainstream use in the future.
Google has been laser focused on AI efforts for a couple of years now, but outside of the Workspace AI developments and all the Gemini updates, we haven’t seen many of the fascinating core AI projects come to life. NotebookLM is one of the few that’s very close to making the cut now, and is in for a massive overhaul with the company’s latest LLM, Gemini 1.5 Pro, under the hood, all for free.
Gemini 1.5 Pro in NotebookLM can turn your homework into an interactive podcast
The tool can now generate spoken dialogue discussions from the information you feed it
If you haven’t heard, NotebookLM is an ongoing AI-powered Google experiment designed to simplify topical research with the assistance of AI and a selected set of data you provide in each instance, called a Notebook. The AI can then help assimilate the information by creating study guides and briefing notes, while answering any questions you might have on the chatbot-style UI, complete with in-line citations.
While NotebookLM sounds like the future of academic research, it has been extremely limited in availability and capability. Thankfully, Google is now fixing that, delivering the upgrade to Gemini 1.5 Pro as promised in the middle of May this year. Most importantly, users won’t need to shell out money to use the new model, even though it costs $20 per month if you want Gemini 1.5 Pro for the all-knowing Gemini Advanced chatbot (via Android Authority).
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The massive change comes alongside more widespread geographic availability of the experiment, bringing NotebookLM to over 200 regions beyond the US. That said, the biggest benefits come from the inclusion of the new Gemini 1.5 Pro, which allows you to add more external sources to your project, such as URLs from the web and Google Slides presentations.
The AI model’s capability to handle a one-million-token context window will help NotebookLM support multiple sources per notebook, with the limit now set at 50 — that’s tenfold the lowly outgoing limit of five sources per notebook. The powerful new AI also means each of these source documents can have 500,000 words each. Full maxed out, that’s 25 million words of data you can access via the chatbot interface, or use for FAQ and lesson plan creation.
With these powerful updates and widespread availability, NotebookLM could soon go mainstream and shed the Experimental badge it currently carries. When that might happen is anyone’s best guess.
