Starting today Google has extended the availability of NotebookLM in over 200 countries around the world, including Italy.
But what is NotebookLM and how can it be described?
It makes use of Gemini 1.5 Pro and is a tool that uses the capabilities of Google’s LLM on user-uploaded information and documents. Then become a virtual research and writing assistant who can summarize facts, explain complex ideas, and brainstorm based on user-selected sources.
Initially known as Project Tailwind within Google Labs, NotebookLM first opened to the world in July 2023, offering itself via a small waiting list in the United States, before arriving nationwide in December of that same year. year.
Today NotebookLM reaches most Google users around the world without distinctions between consumer and business users, and free of charge.
How NotebookLM works
NotebookLM needs a Google account and is mainly used through a chat.
Once opened, you can upload documents from your Drive or PDFs and files. txt from your device. You can also paste text copied elsewhere into a new document, and insert information taken from a website (linking the URL).
Overall it can therefore be digested copied and pasted text, uploaded text files, Google Docs, Google Slides, PDFs, and sources such as Google Drive and website URLs.
NotebookLM basically uses a sort of RAG technique. RAG stands for “Retrieval-Augmented Generation”, and in general it can be described as an AI framework that allows data to be retrieved from an external knowledge base to “supplement” LLMs with more accurate information provided directly by the end user. RAG is based on vector databases, which are matrices equipped with a “direction” to be able to relate data.
He only knows what you tell him
The feature of NotebookLM is that has no knowledge of the “world” other than that provided by sources uploaded or created by the user within the single notebook. If you ask NotebookLM what a blowtorch is and the user has not uploaded anything related to this topic, Google’s tool will respond: “There is no information about what a blowtorch is in these documents.”
In this way hallucinations of the linguistic model derived from prior knowledge of a specific topic are limitedalthough hallucinations are always possible due to the way LLMs work.
Additionally, NotebookLM cannot access the Internet, that is, he cannot find the information he needs online. Everything is strictly linked to the documents provided. In the case of URLs, the tool makes a copy of the site’s information and incorporates it into its own. Therefore, if a site is updated, the user will have to relink the URL to create a “copy” for NotebookLM use with the updated data.
A user can create as many notebooks as he wants, perhaps divided by topic. Each notebook supports up to 25 million words, with up to 500,000 words per source and up to 50 sources per notebook. Averaging 300 words per page, this means that each document can be a book of around 1,600 pages.
You can chat with NotebookLM about the contents of your documents. Based on Gemini 1.5 Pro, which is a multimode model, the tool can also answer questions about images and graphs because it is able to interpret them.
You can also use predefined activities. By taking advantage of the uploaded contents, for the moment it is possible to generate automatic FAQs, a Study Guide, a table of contents, a timeline (to put the information that can be summarized in this way in chronological order), and a briefing document.
NotebookLM’s answers also contain numbered notes that take you back to the point in the source from which a certain result was obtained.
Nothing will be used for training Google’s AI
Google was keen to point out during the worldwide availability announcement of NotebookLM that it does not in any way train the AI on documents that users upload as sources, or on any other information entered into NotebookLM.
This means that you can upload personal information and company information. Although it is a cloud service, everything remains confined to the user’s account.
Steve Johnson, editorial director of Google Labs told us: “If you’re comfortable sharing information on Google Drive, you should feel comfortable doing the same with NotebookLM”.
