Since NotebookLM was made available to a wider audience earlier this year, it has been used by more than a million users, according to Google. In a SARUA social media post in September, it was indicated that NotebookLM can be particularly useful in the academic environment, where users work with large numbers of documents (either original source documents for their research or publications on the topic on which they are working).
A few aspects set NotebookLM apart from some other applications: the user can engage with documents in AI chat mode through Google’s Gemini 1.5 LLM – of course, only with the material they themselves upload and select; the user’s sources are not used for training the LLM; the application is currently free for unlimited use, which differs from a number of similar applications that limit the free requests/chats.
NotebookLM is a virtual research assistant that, apart from interactions or ‘discussions’ in chatbot style, also provides summaries of documents, always indicating in a separate window the sources based on which its responses are generated, in order for the user to check the correctness or appropriateness of the application’s response or to see the relevant context.
NotebookLM is part of a widespread trend in AI application development towards knowledge bases that operate only on defined knowledge sources, amongst others to reducethe chances of ‘hallucination’ and to ensure that private or sensitive business or organisational data are not leaked out in the process of training of an LLM or in user engagement with it.
Recently, some enhancements were made to NotebookLM that make it even more interestingand attractive to users:
- Audio overview podcasts, with what Google calls a ‘deep dive’ discussion between two persons (one female, one male), can be generated automatically, in which these two persons engage with the content of the source. The source can be either a selected document (even a monograph that is uploaded) or a set of selected documents.
Some enhancements and new options provided just a few days ago:
- Users can now provide guiding instructions for the nature of the discussion in the overview.
- Businesses, universities and other organisations can now apply for the NotebookLM Business pilot programme to get early access to new product features and enhanced collaboration within the organisation. (Collaboration and sharing is, of course, already possible with the basic NotebookLM version.) The business version will be a pay application at some tiers, but details of the pricing will be available only later in the year. (https://notebooklm.google/business)
Academic users are advised to try their hands at the basic NotebookLM application, at least, in order to be able to get an understanding of this ‘new’ generation of AI applications, of which there will be many in the coming years. Their students and non-academic partners will probably use this category of AI applications anyway!
