On Thursday, Google unveiled updates to its AI note-taking and research assistant, NotebookLM, enhancing its functionality to include summaries of YouTube videos and audio files, as well as the ability to create shareable AI-generated audio discussions. This expansion aims to broaden the tool's use cases and reach, following its initial launch at last year's I/O developer conference. Since then, NotebookLM has been made available in countries like India and the UK, reaching over 200 countries after its public access debut in the U.S.

Originally focused on educators and learners, NotebookLM has recently shifted its user demographic and is now attracting a significant number of business professionals. Raiza Martin, a senior product manager for AI at Google Labs, shared in an exclusive interview that the user base is now roughly evenly split, with 50% comprising educators and learners, and the other half being professionals in the workplace.

“People are now sharing notebooks, and it’s creating a network effect,” she explained to TechCrunch.

This shift prompted the NotebookLM team to introduce new features aimed at enhancing its network effect and increasing its popularity across various demographics. Earlier this month, NotebookLM launched the Audio Overview feature, which allows users to transform their documents into engaging audio discussions. The latest update builds on this experience by enabling users to share the AI-generated Audio Overview via a public URL.

To utilize this feature, users can click the share icon next to the generated Audio Overview to obtain the URL, which can then be easily shared with others.

Martin noted that her team observed professionals uploading various types of content to NotebookLM, including web pages, resumes, and presentations, to generate Audio Overviews that they could then share with employers, colleagues, or clients.

In addition to these updates, NotebookLM now supports YouTube videos and audio files (such as .mp3 and .wav) as new source types. This enhancement complements the existing support for Google Docs, PDFs, text files, Google Slides, and web pages. The new features allow users to summarize key points from YouTube videos and generate takeaways and insights from audio recordings of their study sessions or projects.

Martin shared with TechCrunch that the NotebookLM team, operating under Google Labs with a small workforce, relies heavily on user feedback for every new feature added to the tool, which is powered by the company’s multimodal large language model, Gemini 1.5 Pro. 

“What’s interesting about AI tools is that a lot of assumptions change,” she noted. “What might have been useful last year might not be useful this year.”

In June, Google broadened access to NotebookLM to over 200 countries after its initial launch in the U.S. late last year. Martin mentioned that while the majority of users are still based in the U.S., Japan has emerged as a significant market for the tool. Interestingly, some users are utilizing NotebookLM to obtain AI-based summarizations in languages different from their tool settings.

“In Japan particularly, we see many documents that are not in Japanese, but NotebookLM is set to Japanese,” she explained. “So people are querying in their native language, often with complex and dense documents in English.”

Google assures users that the information they upload to NotebookLM remains private and is not used for training AI models. To use the tool, users must be at least 18 years old.

However, NotebookLM faces inherent challenges as an AI tool. One concern is that excessive reliance on the tool could lead users to neglect reading long-form content and research papers, which may result in oversimplification of information.

Martin acknowledged these concerns, stating that the team is keenly aware of them. To mitigate this, NotebookLM provides clickable citations from the content users upload, encouraging them to delve deeper into their summarized notes. 

“We try to encourage you to read your original text. We encourage you to double-check all the answers that come out of NotebookLM… You could read SparkNotes or the actual book; it’s always up to you,” she remarked.

Currently, NotebookLM is available only on the web, although Martin indicated that mobile apps could be released sometime next year. Meanwhile, the team is focused on introducing more features, particularly aimed at enhancing input support and expanding output sources.