Earlier this year, Google announced a new AI project called Project
Tailwind, which it described as an AI notebook where people could interact with
their notes and train the model based on their document entries. The project
was later renamed to ‘NotebookLM’ and is currently available as a prototype.
While NotebookLM works as a standalone app for now, it could
likely be later added as a Google Docs or Drive feature where it can assess and
read users’ files.
To use NotebookLM, you first need to create a new project. The
app then prompts you to add sources, based on which it generates a ‘Source
Guide’ - a summary of the entire document, along with some key topics and relevant
questions to ask. Since the app is still in its early stages of development, it
accepts only up to five sources, with each source no more than 10,000 words
long, otherwise the app stops responding.
To put it more precisely, NotebookLM simply works by
training specifically on your personal notes to refine the information in your
document alone. This means that the tool is not meant to enhance your existing
document or research by gathering information for you from the entire internet.
It can also provide you with summaries or outlines of your documents to make
skimming through them easier.
Raiza Martin, product manager in charge of NotebookLM, says
that the model is primarily aimed at exploring user behaviour with regard to
engaging with AI tools that are trained on personal data, as compared to those
that are trained on the internet.
While NotebookLM is specifically designed to be trained on
personal data, the bot does know things from the internet too, which Google
says is some general-knowledge information that is actually quite accurate. This
is to ensure that the bot can help a user outside of their own research when it
can, instead of always responding with “this information is not in your source.”
Looking at the potential it holds, NotebookLM could actually
become the most powerful personalized AI tool on the internet if developed further.
