Google’s big learning tool just got a bit of a boost.
You can tell NotebookLM is pretty key to Google’s whole AI strategy, given how fast it’s been adding new features lately. Just a month or so back, the tool’s top-notch Audio Overviews feature got video support, and then in September, it got even better with new voices and tones for that feature.
Now, Google is launching even more changes – and this time they’re all aimed at making NotebookLM smarten up and get more powerful.
To start with, the tool has just got some back-end tinkering that should see its performance & quality shoot up, and its comprehension get a whole lot better.
This was done by plugging in Gemini’s full 1-million token context window into NotebookLM’s chat – and guess what? That’s a thing all plans get, and is supposed to make it faster to analyse big collections of documents at a time. Plus, Google says they’ve increased NotebookLM’s ability to have a multi-turn conversation by more than sixfold – so you can now get more useful & relevant results when you spend more time chatting to it.
Google’s also reportedly made NotebookLM better at finding relevant info in your sources, by having it go a bit deeper than just the prompt & try to give you more nuanced responses.
And also, your NotebookLM conversations will now get saved automatically. You can now basically just shut down a session & pick it back up again later without losing a thing. You can delete the chat history any time you like, and also your own chat history in shared notebooks will only ever be visible to you. These changes are all due to roll out over the next week or so.
Lastly and most importantly, users should now be able to personalise their NotebookLM chats to help them meet specific goals. This can be things like telling the tool to work towards a particular goal, adopt a particular voice or role, like being a PhD student looking at sources, or a creative type just mucking about with ideas.