Google’s AI-powered Notes app is now called NotebookLM, and it’s launching today

Project Tailwind, the AI-assisted note-taking tool that Google launched at this year’s I/O developer conference, is getting a rebranding. it is now known as notebooklm, and according to a Google blog post, it’s being launched today to “a small group of users in the US.” (LM stands for Language Model because google In fact It wants to make sure you don’t forget about all the AI ​​here.) However, the product hasn’t changed: Google is still trying to give users its own personal AI, trained on their data and notes and used to understand them. able to help. all this.

It appears that the origins of NotebookLM actually begin in Google Docs. (“We’ll be adding additional formats soon,” the blog post said.) Once you’ve got access to the app, you’ll be able to choose a bunch of documents and then ask questions about them and even edit them. that you will be able to use NotebookLM to create new documents. stuff with them.

Google provides some ideas for things you can do in NotebookLM, such as automatically summarizing a long document or turning a video outline into a script. Google’s examples, even on I/O, seem to be primarily geared towards students: you can ask for a summary of your class notes for the week or let NotebookLM tell you everything What you have learned this semester about the Peloponnesian War.

These are features you’ll hear about in practically any AI product, but Google is hoping that by restricting the underlying model to only the information you add yourself, it can improve the model’s responses and its accuracy. Might help reduce the trend. Confidently lying about everything. (Google isn’t unique in this idea: Dropbox, Mem, Notion, and many others are following suit with hyper-specialized AI tools of their own.) NotebookLM also has citations built-in, making it easy to do quick fact-checks. Will go Automatically generated responses. But Google cautions that NotebookLM can still cause confusion and the model won’t always get it right. Of course, it also depends on the information you provided – if you wrote down the wrong dates for the Peloponnesian War in class, it might not help you.

Google says that NotebookLM models only have access to documents you upload and your data is neither available to others nor used to train new AI models. This is one of the trickiest parts of a product like this: Google is asking users to give their personal information to an AI model in exchange for some convenient and useful features, and the more sensitive the information, the bigger the deal. It only gets complicated.

Maybe that’s why Google is starting small. NotebookLM is still only accessible via a waiting list in Google Labs, and the introductory blog post reiterates a few times that the product is still in its infancy. But just as Search Generative Experiences has the potential to reshape Google Search, don’t be surprised if NotebookLM looks a lot like Google Drive’s long-term future.