Google's Notebook LM Features

Jun 9, 2025

Overview

This presentation reviews the evolution and key features of Google's Notebook LM, an AI-powered platform designed to help users deeply understand and organize information from diverse sources, featuring updates such as multimodal support, expanded context windows, collaborative tools, and personalized audio overviews.

What is Notebook LM?

  • Notebook LM is described as a tool for understanding, differentiating itself from other AI platforms like ChatGPT.
  • It allows users to centralize various sources (websites, PDFs, videos, personal notes) for a specific project.

Feature 1: Audio Overviews and Interactive Mode

  • Users can generate customizable podcast-style conversations summarizing combined sources for any topic.
  • The interactive mode enables real-time participation in AI-generated audio discussions to add new context or ask questions.
  • Audio overviews help users grasp a broad perspective quickly and are accessible for auditory learners.

Feature 2: Expanded Context Window

  • Notebook LM now supports up to 50 sources, each with 500,000 words (totaling 25 million words), dramatically improving its short-term memory.
  • This feature enables deep, contextual analyses, such as reviewing entire personal note archives or comprehensive sets of business documents.
  • AI suggestions and study guides are generated based on users' entire content histories.

Feature 3: Multimodal Sources

  • The platform accepts various file types, including PDFs, Google Docs, audio files, web links, and now images from Google Slides.
  • Users can analyze and compare complex information, such as insurance proposals presented via slides, with source-grounded citations.

Feature 4: Redesigned Interface and Source Grounding

  • The interface is organized into sources, chat, and studio panels for streamlined navigation and output management.
  • Inline citations in responses allow users to verify AI outputs, addressing concerns about AI hallucination and increasing trustworthiness.
  • Valuable insights can be saved directly to notes for future reference.

Feature 5: Notebook LM Plus (Paid Version)

  • The Plus version offers a larger context window, higher usage limits, customizable chat modes, and collaborative sharing via links.
  • Collaboration features allow teams to jointly access, discuss, and build on shared notebooks.

Application Examples

  • Researching travel, compiling learning notes, summarizing business presentations, and personal journaling are demonstrated as use cases.
  • Users can upload diverse data sets to generate analyses, guides, and personalized recommendations.

Summary & Takeaways

  • Notebook LM’s latest features empower faster and deeper learning with massive, organized context and trustworthy, personalized AI guidance.
  • The platform is suitable for individual research, team projects, and ongoing personal or professional development.