The AI Economy: NotebookLM Adds Premium Tier, New Features

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Google is taking its popular NotebookLM app to the next level. No longer just an experiment, the company is unveiling a series of updates on Friday that position the notebook tool as a fully mature product. The first is a premium tier called NotebookLM Plus, designed with enterprise users in mind, followed by a revamped generative AI user interface and an update that lets you interact with Audio Overviews.

Launched a year ago, NotebookLM may seem like an AI-powered version of Evernote or Microsoft OneDrive, but it offers much more. Users can apply artificial intelligence to imported notes and documents to create summaries, outlines, study guides, or other forms of content. It’s handy if you have to manage information spread across many sources within a single notebook.

“It just takes things that often in the past would take 30 minutes or an hour. It gets you a first draft of them in 30 seconds,” Google Labs’ Editorial Director Steven Johnson explains to me in an interview. “We’re seeing anybody who works with knowledge in any form; if you sit down and upload the core documents that are important to what you do into NotebookLM and mess around for 30 minutes, you will see that there’s so much utility there that would be mindblowing if it were two years ago.”

Major update rolling out today at NotebookLM: a completely new adaptive design; interact with the Audio Overview hosts; and NotebookLM Plus–our premium version with expanded features.

Full features below 👇

New flexible "3-panel" interface lets you easily switch between asking… pic.twitter.com/VRBLgDPcAZ
— Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson) December 13, 2024

Introducing NotebookLM Plus

NotebookLM fans have yearned for higher limits regarding the number of notebooks, Audio Overviews, and chat interactions permitted. To solve this problem, Google is launching the NotebookLM Plus subscription plan. It’s available to business and enterprise customers, schools, and universities through Google Workspace or Google Cloud. Anyone who pays for Google One AI Premium will also have access to this premium tier. NotebookLM Plus will be available starting in early 2025.

Comparing what you receive with NotebookLM and NotebookLM Plus, a premium subscription offering for the enterprise. Image credit: Screenshot

With NotebookLM Plus, subscribers can now manage up to 500 notebooks and 300 sources per notebook, significantly increasing from the previous limit of 100 notebooks and 50 sources. Additionally, Google has boosted daily usage limits, allowing 500 chat queries and 20 audio generations per day, up from 50 and just three audio generations.

As a paid offering designed for professionals, the company is adding new features. One of them, Johnson points out, involves transforming a notebook into a public knowledge base or Help Center—”a kind of guidebook that you can share with your team or organization.” He intimates that a user could create a notebook containing an organization’s onboarding documents and when a new team member joins, they could access the notebook as a starting point. Johnson describes this feature as one that his team has “seen a lot of internally at Google” and that it “turns out to be a really great surface for that kind of functionality where…I need to have a canonical body of knowledge.”

In addition, NotebookLM Plus subscribers will have the option of customizing the AI’s conversational style. The new offering is called “guide” and is “designed to be the voice of a guidebook or a help center.” Johnson admits that while the default style is “very informative” and “information-rich,” it’s also “banter-poor, unlike our Audio Overviews, which go in the other direction.” The guide style serves to act like a hotel concierge to help you navigate your way through the information.

Redesigned NotebookLM User Interface

NotebookLM’s user interface as of Dec. 12, 2024, before Google’s design refresh. Image credit: Screenshot

Underscoring NotebookLM’s evolution from a minimal viable product (MVP) to a mature app, Google is giving it a design refresh. The company is moving away from its two-panel design (shown above) and shifting to a three-panel offering. “Think of it as like a flexible or dynamic interface that is adapting the kind of seamless way to whatever you’re trying to do in the product,” Johnson states. And although this UI is new, Google has planted some “seeds” of this look and feel in the past. Nevertheless, I’m told what is rolling out on Friday should be considered NotebookLM’s “foundation.”

The left panel is where you will find your sources. It’s the knowledge you’re importing to accomplish the task you’re working on. This is where the information is used to train the AI. Next to it is the middle panel, where you’ll interact with the AI. Finally, the right panel is a new area that Google dubbed Studio, and this is where you “make things.”

NotebookLM’s user interface as of Dec. 13, 2024, after Google’s design refresh. Image credit: Google

“You can think of it as, on the left-hand side, you have your inputs—this is the knowledge I want to put into the system,” Johnson remarks. “In the middle is where you do your kind of understanding and exploring of the ideas, and the right-hand side of the outputs where you generate things that you want to share with the rest of the world.”

He proudly notes that the new UI results from an effort the company has tried to execute since as far back as when NotebookLM was still codenamed Tailwind. At that time, the team was searching for the “best new, genuinely new interfaces for interacting with generative AI. Surely, the metaphor of having a text message chat with an AI is just the beginning. There are other things that you can do. And this is our kind of attempt to really get that vision out there in front of people, and we’re super psyched about it.”

One thing that hasn’t received an upgrade is the model powering NotebookLM. Johnson confirms that Google Gemini 1.5 Pro will still power the app. However, he revealed it would be updated soon to Gemini 2.0, which was released earlier this week.

You Can Interact With Audio Overviews

Interactive audio overviews within Google NotebookLM. Image credit: Google/screenshot

The final update to NotebookLM introduces Audio Overviews, a feature Johnson says has seen “amazing” adoption since its launch. “We knew it was going to be a hit,” he adds. Users have embraced the tool in diverse ways, from workshopping short stories to importing journals for the AI to narrate their life experiences. Others have used it to have the AI highlight their accomplishments based on their resumes, assist with study materials, and much more. The flurry of activity has convinced Google to double down on the service.

To that end, the company is releasing, in beta, a way to interact with Audio Overviews. First teased at this year’s Google I/O, users can interject through an Audio Overview they created, and the hosts will respond accordingly. In an example Johnson provided, the AI hosts discussed early European exploration and colonization of the Americas. Pressing the “join” button, he inquired about Christopher Columbus and asked if the hosts would talk about his journeys, to which they complied.

“It’s like you’re passing a note to them in the middle of the recording of the podcast,” Johnson states.

Interactive Audio Overviews are only helpful in-app and to those who have access to the notebook. However, the potential is enormous because instead of sitting through a lengthy audio file to hear a specific point, you can interrupt and ask the hosts to discuss the information you really want. And you can interject as many times as you’d like.

This feature will be limited to new Audio Overviews and is limited to English, though there are plans to expand to other languages next year. Google also warns that AI hosts may pause awkwardly before responding or could hallucinate.

And, unlike the rest of NotebookLM today, interactive audio overviews are powered by Gemini 2.0!

NotebookLM Reaches Maturity

After my interview with Johnson, I asked him what he wanted people to think about when they saw this new version of NotebookLM. The goal is to get people to see this as a mature product, Johnson says, highlighting that Google eliminated the experimental label affixed to the app for so long.

“I look at this, and it feels like there’s so much more polish in the interface. I think we have solved the basic underlying problem of how should we organize all these new features and new ways of interacting with the AI. We have a foundation with this three-panel use and in that studio panel, we have a great place to add more creative tools building on Audio Overview. So it feels like this is now that we’ve finally built a real foundation for an enduring product.”

Johnson concedes that it was nice early on for NotebookLM to appear different “because we were trying to show that we were doing something different.” But now, it has a mature foundation that he claims Google will “be able to do some great things on top of.”

All of these NotebookLM updates are being rolled out today.

Featured Image: AI-generated image of a notebook with an audiowave overlaid on top. Image credit: Adobe Firefly

Today’s Visual Snapshot

The most downloaded models on Hugging Face in 2024. Image credit: Hugging Face

Hugging Face, the go-to hub for AI models, has released its annual roundup, which showcases the latest trends in open-source artificial intelligence. One standout from the report is this chart: the most downloaded model of the year (see above). In 2024, Alibaba’s Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct was the most sought-after, with over a quarter of downloads. Meta’s Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-GGUF model was in second with 7.56 percent.

Although the above chart is specific to this year, Hugging Face notes that from 2022 to today, there is a trend in the rise of smaller models—not large models—being preferred.

Quote This

“When we started Alexa, and we shared that our goal and our mission was to build the world’s best personal assistant, a lot of people scoffed at that. And they scoffed at it because it’s actually really broad surface area and it’s hard to do […] We have a real chance for Alexa to be the leader here. Now, we are in the process right now of rearchitecting the brains of Alexa with multiple foundation models, and it’s going to not only help Alexa answer your questions even better, but it’s going to do what very few generative AI applications do today, which is to understand and anticipate your needs and actually take action for you. So, you can expect to see this in the coming months.”

— Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy at the company’s re:Invent conference discussing how Amazon is leveraging AI to make Alexa a more capable and proactive assistant.

This Week’s AI News

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