Project Tailwind, the AI-backed note-taking tool that Google launched at this year’s I/O developer conference, is rebranding. It’s now known as NotebookLM, and it’s rolling out today to “a small group of users in the US,” according to a Google blog post. (LM stands for Language Model because Google Granted (Want to make sure you don’t miss out on all the AI here.) The product hasn’t changed, though: Google is still trying to give users their own personal AI, trained on their data and notes and helpful them to understand all this.
The core of NotebookLM seems to actually start with Google Docs. (“We’ll be adding more formats soon,” the blog post says.) Once you get access to the app, you can select a set of docs and then use NotebookLM to query them and even create a new one. thing with them.
Google offers some ideas for things you can do with NotebookLM, such as automatically summarizing a long document or turning a video outline into a script. Google’s examples, even back to I/O, seem to be aimed at students: you can ask for a summary of your class notes for the week or NotebookLM to tell you everything you learned about the Peloponnesian War today semester.
These are the kinds of features you’ll hear about in almost any AI product, but Google hopes that by limiting the underlying model to only the information you add yourself, it can improve the model’s answers. and help reduce its likelihood. confident to lie to everyone. (Google isn’t unique to this idea, either: Dropbox, Mem, Notion, and many others are pursuing similar hyper-specific AI tools of their own.) NotebookLM also has citations built in, which should be makes it easy to quickly check the truth of automatically generated answers. But Google warns that NotebookLM can still hallucinate and that the model is not always correct. This also, of course, depends on the information you provide — if you write the wrong dates of the Peloponnesian War in class, it won’t help you.
Google says that the NotebookLM model only has access to the documents you choose to upload and that your data will not be used by others or used to train new AI models. This is one of the most difficult parts of a product like this: Google asks users to give their private information to an AI model in exchange for some convenient and useful features, and that tradeoff can be more complicated if the information is more sensitive.
That’s why Google started small. NotebookLM is only accessible through the Google Labs waitlist, and the introductory blog post reiterated several times that the product is still in its infancy. But just as the Search Generative Experience has the potential to change Google Search, don’t be surprised if NotebookLM looks a lot like the long-term future of Google Drive.