Google’s NotebookLM Rolls Out in India, Gets Gemini 1.5 Pro Upgrade

Google’s NotebookLM received several new features and was expanded to more than 200 countries and regions on Thursday. The AI-powered research and writing assistant was initially introduced at last year’s Google I/O event as Project Tailwind and was later rolled out to a limited number of users in the US. Now, the platform is available to users in India and other countries with features such as web URLs and Google Slides as sources, inline citations, and more. It is also powered by the Gemini 1.5 Pro AI model.

NotebookLM gets new features

After the integration with Gemini 1.5 Pro, the AI model that powers Gemini Advanced, NotebookLM now has multimodal capabilities. What this means is that users can add pictures, charts, and diagrams in sources and the platform will answer questions about them. Earlier, it could only read and analyse the text.

NotebookLM platform
Photo Credit: Google

Another useful new feature is the inclusion of Google Slides and website URLs as sources. With this, users can upload a link to a website or a Google Slides file and have the AI chatbot organise and answer questions on it. The Gemini 1.5 Pro model is again useful here as it lets the chatbot go through the slides. Other than that, users can upload sources from Google Drive, PDF files, Text files, and copied text.

Further, the platform now shows inline citations for its generated responses. Hovering over the citation will open the supporting passage from the source for easy fact-checking. Users can also click the passage to dive deeper into the original text. Additionally, the NotebookLM also has a deeper level of understanding of the sources, and it can generate frequently asked questions (FAQs), briefing documents, and study guides when prompted.

During a media briefing, Raiza Martin, Senior Product Manager at Google Labs, told Gadgets 360 that the AI model will not be trained on the user’s data or the sources in any capacity. Further, journalists were told that since NotebookLM is a closed system, it does not run a web search to answer any question and only relies on the information present in the sources.

How to use NotebookLM

1. Go to the NotebookLM website by clicking here.
2. Tap on Try NotebookLM.
3. Look for the Sources icon on the left margin.
4. There should be a plus icon next to it. Click it.
5. Choose your preferred mode of uploading source.
6. Choose the file or URL you want to use.
7. Now, you can type your query in the text field at the bottom.