If you haven’t heard of it, that’s okay, but an AI tool from Google that could really help many writers or anyone involved in digital writing has gone global. The Generative AI tool in question is called NotebookLM and it is powered by Gemini 1.5. Previously, it was only available in the US market, but now it has rolled out to 200+ countries and languages, including Malaysia (this also includes Bahasa Melayu and other Malaysian languages). Access is now available to everyone on notebooklm.google.com.
What NotebookLM does is provide a somewhat private AI that can cross-check across whatever sources you upload to it and provide answers to queries about this from a prompt. This means the data used by the AI is entirely yours, but you can also glean insights from said data that you wouldn’t normally see. For example, uploading all the articles and news on TechNave could potentially allow us to generate new articles based on this data in seconds.
We managed to spend some time with the tool, and it does what not many other generative AI tools do, in that it only sources the documents that you upload. And if it doesn’t know, it will say so, greatly reducing the possibility of an AI hallucination (although it does make it somewhat boring if it repeatedly says it doesn’t know after a while). According to NotebookLM:
The newest feature of NotebookLM is that it now supports images in Google Slides and Docs. NotebookLM can be used to ask questions about visual information such as charts, graphs, photos, diagrams and other visual elements. Images may also be returned as citations when they contain relevant information. NotebookLM is still in its early testing phase, so access is currently free. However, there are limitations on sources and notebooks. Each source can contain a maximum of 500,000 words and each notebook can contain a maximum of 50 sources and 1,000 notes. Additionally, NotebookLM does not currently support version control or revision history for notes. It is important to note that NotebookLM is best used on a desktop computer as the font size may appear too small on mobile devices. NotebookLM
Having tried it on both a phone and a desktop-like environment with Samsung DeX, we have to say that it is easier to use on a desktop, but I could still see the text on my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. It is noteworthy to say that the AI itself did not mention that it can now also source websites, but just make sure to add the “https://” in the url as just “www.xxxx.com” gets an error. Once you’ve done this, the source is loaded in a matter of minutes while 3 AI suggested highlighted questions are provided to get you started.
We’ll be back to provide a few more first impressions about Google NotebookLM after we’ve had some more time with it, but in the meantime, are you interested in using NotebookLM? What would you use it for? Share your thoughts and comments in the comments below and stay tuned to TechNave.com
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