Google has unveiled a new personalised AI-based note-taking app called NotebookLM to help people learn faster. The new app was first announced at the Google I/O event in May this year under the name Project Tailwind and is currently an experimental product from Google Labs. Google says it wants to reimagine what note-taking software could look like if it were designed from the ground up using a powerful language model. The new AI is only available for Google Docs at the moment, but the search giant promises to add new formats soon. NotebookLM is also only available to users in the US by signing up to a Google Labs waiting list.
While introducing the new notes app in a blog post, Google wrote, “NotebookLM is an experimental product designed to use the power and promise of language models paired with your existing content to gain critical insights, faster. Think of it as a virtual research assistant that can summarize facts, explain complex ideas, and brainstorm new connections — all based on the sources you select.” With NotebookLM, Google aims to solve, or at least mitigate, the biggest problem associated with artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT and Bard: ‘hallucination’, the phenomenon where a large language model (LLM) generates incorrect information and confidently presents it as the correct answer. Google uses a process called ‘source-grounding’, which the company claims effectively creates a personalised AI that knows the information relevant to you. Source-grounding allows the language model to analyse your notes and sources for answers. However, Google warns against blindly trusting its application and urges users to check the AI’s answers against the original source material.