Google’s NotebookLM now lets you direct AI-generated voice conversations, launching a business beta

Google on Thursday updated the audio summarization feature for its AI-powered research and note-taking assistant NotebookLM, which has recently gained significant attention for its features. Podcast like Voice conversations based on the content users share, with the ability to guide those conversations and focus on specific topics rather than just creating comprehensive audio summaries.

Today, NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews feature allows users to ingest and understand information in long documents or videos through AI-generated audio conversations. Shortly after its launch last month, the feature helped NotebookLM attract attention, as many began sharing audio summaries of their content on social media, including those created with Diaries or journals.

Although Google did not disclose the impact NotebookLM received as a result, data from its website traffic analytics platform Similar site NotebookLM saw a more than 371% increase in its traffic in September to 3.07 million monthly visits, compared to 652,181 a month ago.

So far, Voice Overviews automatically generates AI conversations from user sources. But since conversations sometimes revolve around unimportant content, Google is rolling out an update that allows you to customize overviews based on your needs. This allows users to make the audio more focused on a specific topic within their content.

A dedicated “Assign” control is available before the existing “Create” button to allow you to instruct your voice AI hosts to focus on a specific point.

Raiza Martin, NotebookLM product lead and AI product manager at Google Labs, told TechCrunch that the update gives users a way to nudge the AI ​​to move in the direction they want.

“The entire team was dedicated to listening to and analyzing all the feedback we received. The first feature that came out that people wanted was just to give a little boost to the AI,” she said.

Personalizing audio summaries may also help reduce hallucinations to some extent, meaning that at those times the AI ​​prepares the content on its own. However, Martin said the NotebookLM team is tracking user feedback and trying to detect the hallucinations as quickly as possible.

She also stressed that customizing audio summaries does not mean that user instructions will be used to train the AI ​​model.

“In general, we don’t train on user data. So, your use of it, any queries you enter, any answers you enter, we don’t train models on it. We solicit a lot of feedback from our users.

Besides the customization option, users get background listening in Audio Overviews. This allows you to continue working within NotebookLM, query your sources, receive citations, and explore related quotes while audio plays in the background.

NotebookLM was initially launched as a project at last year’s Google I/O developer conference and was first released to public access in the US in December. It expanded to markets including India, the UK and more than 200 countries in June. Although the product initially saw some interest in educational and research use cases, companies and organizations only started trying it after Google expanded its support for more sources and added new features.

Now, Google says more than 80,000 organizations are using NotebookLM, which it sees as an opportunity to explore monetization. Hoping to capitalize on that traction, the company on Thursday launched the NotebookLM Business beta program.

Businesses can apply for the beta program, and if it’s accepted, Google said, they’ll get early access to product features, training, and email support.

Martin told TechCrunch that as part of the business pilot, her team is training organizations interested in using NotebookLM on how other companies can use it.

“we [also] “We want companies to tell us, here are the features we want to deploy,” she said.

General availability and pricing for NotebookLM Business will be announced later this year. However, Google has yet to reveal the exact timeline and any details about pricing levels.

NotebookLM currently gets 4.17 million monthly visits, with 2.5 million coming from desktops and 1.6 million from mobile devices, according to SimilarWeb.

Assistant currently does not have a dedicated mobile app and is available across screens through its website. However, Martin told TechCrunch that the team is actively exploring a native mobile experience to expand NotebookLM’s presence among smartphone users. It also explores more sounds, languages, and controls for Audio Overviews.

Furthermore, the team has been exploring and prototyping different numbers of speakers – to go beyond existing speakers for AI voice discussions – although they are unlikely to be available soon as Martin said it is not the most requested feature by users.

Last month, NotebookLM added YouTube videos and audio files as sources for creating summaries alongside existing sources such as Google Drive, URLs, PDFs, and text.

Martin said NotebookLM sees PDF files and YouTube videos as the two most important sources. The team also noted a “very high percentage” of users who listened to the audio overview and used chat. The next largest group includes users who only use chat without creating a voice overview.