Introducing NotebookLM

At Google I/O this year we introduced a number of AI-first experiments in development, including Project Tailwind — a new kind of notebook designed to help people learn faster.

Today we’re beginning to roll out Project Tailwind with its new name: NotebookLM, an experimental offering from Google Labs. It’s our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core: hence the LM. It will be immediately available to a small group of users in the U.S. as we continue to refine the product and make it more helpful.

It’s hard to go from information to insight

We know people are struggling with the rapid growth of information — it's everywhere and it’s overwhelming. As we've been talking with students, professors and knowledge workers, one of the biggest challenges is synthesizing facts and ideas from multiple sources. You often have the sources you want, but it's time consuming to make the connections.

We started to explore what we could build that would help people make connections faster in the midst of all this data, especially using sources they care most about.

NotebookLM: an AI notebook for everyone

NotebookLM is an experimental product designed to use the power and promise of language models paired with your existing content to gain critical insights, faster. Think of it as a virtual research assistant that can summarize facts, explain complex ideas, and brainstorm new connections — all based on the sources you select.

A key difference between NotebookLM and traditional AI chatbots is that NotebookLM lets you “ground” the language model in your notes and sources. Source-grounding effectively creates a personalized AI that’s versed in the information relevant to you. Starting today, you can ground NotebookLM in specific Google Docs that you choose, and we’ll be adding additional formats soon.

Once you’ve selected your Google Docs, you can do three things:

• Get a summary: When you first add a Google Doc into NotebookLM, it will automatically generate a summary, along with key topics and questions to ask so you get a better understanding of the material.
• Ask questions: When you’re ready for a deeper dive, you can ask questions about the documents you’ve uploaded. For example:
  • A medical student could upload a scientific article about neuroscience and tell NotebookLM to “create a glossary of key terms related to dopamine”
  • An author working on a biography could upload research notes and ask a question like: “Summarize all the times Houdini and Conan Doyle interacted.”
• Generate ideas: NotebookLM isn’t just for Q&A. We’ve found some of its more delightful and useful capabilities are when it’s able to help people come up with creative new ideas. For example:
  • A content creator could upload their ideas for new videos and ask: “Generate a script for a short video on this topic.”
  • Or an entrepreneur raising money could upload their pitch and ask: “What questions would potential investors ask?”

While NotebookLM’s source-grounding does seem to reduce the risk of model “hallucinations,” it’s always important to fact-check the AI’s responses against your original source material. When you're drawing on multiple sources, we make that fact-checking easy by accompanying each response with citations, showing you the most relevant original quotes from your sources.

Learning and building, together

NotebookLM is an experimental product, built by a small team in Google Labs.

Our team has two goals in mind:

• Build a product with our users: We’ll be talking to people and communities often to learn about what’s working well and where the gaps are, with the intent of making NotebookLM a truly useful product.
• Roll out this technology responsibly: Getting feedback directly from you is a critical part of developing AI responsibly. We will also use a strict set of safety criteria in alignment with our AI Principles and implement appropriate safeguards before expanding to more users and launching new functionality.

We’ve built NotebookLM such that the model only has access to the source material that you’ve chosen to upload, and your files and dialogue with the AI are not visible to other users. We do not use any of the data collected to train new AI models.

We hope that in these early days you give NotebookLM a shot. Sign up to the waitlist to try it out!