Google Thursday updated the audio summarization feature of its AI note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM, which recently gained significant attention for its podcast-like audio conversations based on the content users share, with the ability to guide those conversations and focus on specific topics instead of just generating holistic audio summaries.
Today, audio Overviews in NotebookLM allow users to digest and comprehend the information in lengthy documents or videos through AI-generated audio conversations. Shortly after its launch last month, the feature helped NotebookLM grab eyeballs, as many began sharing audio summaries of their content on social media, including those created using their diaries or journals.
While Google hasn’t disclosed the traction NotebookLM has received as a result, data from the website traffic analytics platform SimilarWeb suggests NotebookLM saw an over 371% increase in its traffic in September to 3.07 million monthly visits, up from 652,181 a month ago.
Until now, Audio Overviews would automatically generate AI conversations from users’ sources. But since conversations sometimes revolve around content that isn’t important, Google is introducing an update that allows you to customize the overviews based on your needs. This lets users make the audio more focused on a particular topic within their content.
A dedicated “Customize” control is available before the existing “Generate” button to let you provide instructions for the AI hosts in the audio to focus on a specific point.
Raiza Martin, NotebookLM’s product leader and a senior product manager for AI at Google Labs, told TechCrunch that the update gives users a way to nudge the AI to move in a direction they want.
“The whole team has been dedicated to listening to and analyzing all of the feedback we’ve gotten. And the number one feature that emerged that people wanted was just to give the AI a little nudge,” she said.
Customizing audio summaries may also help reduce hallucination to some extent, meaning those times the AI cooks up content on its own. Nonetheless, Martin said NotebookLM team tracks user feedback and tries to catch hallucinations as quickly as possible.
She also emphasized that customizing audio summaries doesn’t mean user instructions would be used to train the AI model.
“In general, we do not train on user data. So, your use of it, or whatever queries you enter, whatever answers you enter, we don’t train the models with it,” she said, adding, “We solicit a lot of feedback from our users.”
Alongside the customization option, users get background listening in Audio Overviews. This allows you to continue working within NotebookLM, query your sources, receive citations, and explore relevant quotes while the audio plays in the background.
NotebookLM was initially launched as a project at Google’s I/O developer conference last year and debuted for public access in the U.S. in December. It expanded to markets including India, the U.K., and more than 200 countries in June. Although the product initially saw some traction within education and research use cases, businesses and organizations only began to try it after Google expanded its support for more sources and added new features.
Now, Google says that over 80,000 organizations use NotebookLM, which it sees as an opportunity to explore monetization. Hoping to capitalize on this traction, the company on Thursday launched the NotebookLM Business pilot program.
Businesses can apply for the pilot, and if accepted, Google said, they will get early access to product features, training, and email support.
Martin told TechCrunch that under the business pilot, her team trains organizations interested in using NotebookLM as to how other businesses are using it.
“We [also] want businesses to tell us, here are the features we want to deploy,” she said.
General availability and pricing of NotebookLM Business will be announced later this year. However, Google hasn’t yet revealed the exact timeline and any specifics on the pricing tiers.
NotebookLM currently gets 4.17 million monthly visits, with 2.5 million coming from desktops and 1.6 million from mobile devices, per SimilarWeb.
The assistant at present doesn’t have a dedicated mobile app and is available across screens through its website. However, Martin told TechCrunch that the team is actively exploring a native mobile experience to expand NotebookLM’s presence among smartphone users. It’s also exploring more voices, languages, and controls for Audio Overviews.
Further, the team explored and prototyped different numbers of speakers — to go beyond the existing two speakers for AI audio discussions — though it’s not likely to be available soon as Martin said that it wasn’t the top-requested feature by users.
Last month, NotebookLM added YouTube videos and audio files as sources for generating summaries alongside existing sources such as Google Drive, URLs, PDFs, and text.
Martin said NotebookLM sees PDFs and YouTube videos as the top two sources. The team also observed a “very high percentage” of users who listened to an audio overview and used the chat. The next largest group comprises users who only use the chat without generating an audio overview.