Google launches NotebookLM Business to create audio and text using AI for businesses

Google will soon offer a paid version of its AI research tool NotebookLM aimed specifically at businesses.

NotebookLM Business will have “expanded features for businesses, universities and organizations.” Currently access to NotebookLM Business is through a pilot program for early access to its features, training and email support.

Google told VentureBeat in an email that participants in the NotebookLM Business pilot “will gain significant advantage through enhanced features to increase productivity and collaboration.” These features include higher usage limits and new features like customization and sharing notebooks with team members. The company said these features could open up new use cases for companies using the tool.

“We've seen this early feature streamline onboarding, shared understanding of complex projects, and building a central repository of your team's collective intelligence within a collaborative notebook environment,” a spokesperson said.

Another feature that will be part of NotebookLM Business is the Audio Overview, which allows users to create an annotated study guide.

Google said the paid version will continue to have robust privacy and security.

NotebookLM, built with Gemini 1.5, allows users to upload source material into “notebooks” to collect information and ask the Gemini chatbot questions about research. NotebookLM was first announced in July last year and became generally available in December.

Google will also remove the “experimental” tag from the tool.

Raiza Martin, product manager at NotebookLM, previously told VentureBeat that the team has seen many different uses for the platform, including some for enterprises. Although NotebookLM was never intended for a specific audience, Martin said many researchers and students have adopted the product. Many companies have also started using NotebookLM as an information store for teams.

Google will announce general availability and pricing for NotebookLM Business later this year.

Additional control over audio

Along with the announcement of NotebookLM Business, Google has updated NotebookLM's audio overview feature. Audio Overview allows users to create podcasts about their research. Google characterized Audio Overview as a spoken research or study guide rather than a podcast. However, in the first version, two voices (one male and one female) talked about the information in the notebook, which reminded many of podcasts.

The audio overview proved popular with some users, with many posting their generated audio on social media. Martin had previously promised additional controls over the audio overview and said the company's research found that conversations helped people retain more information.

Users can now direct more of the conversation in the audio overview and ask the model to focus on specific topics or expertise. Audio summaries will continue to play while users query their sources or ask questions using the chat feature.

I was able to explore the updated audio overview features early. In a notebook with resources around AI Orchestration, I said to focus on the definition of orchestration and how different frameworks like LangChain work. The final product was about AI orchestration based on the various blog posts and YouTube videos I uploaded. However, the two “moderators” talked about frameworks as if LangChain was the only orchestration framework on the market. This could be a misunderstanding of my prompt where I specifically mentioned LangChain, as the source docs definitely talk about available tools.

However, Google notes that audio summaries “are generated discussions and do not represent a comprehensive or objective view of a topic.” Only information contained in the uploaded source materials will be considered.

Open NotebookLM, an open source competitor to NotebookLM, launched last month and included an audio recap feature. Although Open NotebookLM does not have the same fact-checking capabilities as NotebookLM, it represents a change in the ease of deployment complex AI-driven platforms.