Google NotebookLM Is Finally Getting an App

Personal opinion: NotebookLM is probably Google’s most useful AI product. You can feed it sources and use it as a useful and capable research/study tool. So it’s a shame, then, to see that it somehow doesn’t have an app—Google pays more attention to Gemini instead. Now, though, this is finally changing.

In a recent post via X (formerly Twitter), the team behind the tool announced that “the NotebookLM app is coming soon,” letting us in on the news that Google is, indeed, working on a mobile app for its NotebookLM AI tool. Since it was first launched, NotebookLM has worked as a website-first interface. That has been mostly okay since the best way to interact with it is through a computer browser—it’s easier to load up files/sources and ask questions from a computer than from a smartphone. But there are some cases where you still want to use it on the go—maybe you already loaded up your notebook’s sources elsewhere and you want to jog your memory a bit before an exam.

To Google’s credit, the website works on smartphones, and users can even save it as a Progressive Web App (PWA) on their smartphones so they can easily load it up without going into the website manually from the browser. Still, if the experience can be improved upon further, it’s better for everyone this way, so it’s good to see that Google is working on a proper app.

In case you’ve never used it, NotebookLM leverages Google’s AI models to help users interact with their own uploaded documents. The tool is good for a range of uses, letting you summarize complex texts, ask specific questions about the source material, and generate new ideas based on the provided information. It’s designed as a personalized AI collaborator, particularly useful for students, researchers, writers, and really anyone needing to deeply understand and synthesize information from multiple sources.

Related

Google NotebookLM Can Now Try to Find Sources for You

You can search the web straight from NotebookLM now.

It’s cool because while Gemini can still look at documents and answer questions based on that info, you can upload up to 50 sources or 300 sources for Pro users on NotebookLM. It’s a different, more scalable AI chatbot that’s better geared for actually helping you read sources, magazines, and books, especially when they’re really long or otherwise dense sources. Since it also gives answers based on the sources you give it, it will rarely tell you anything that’s not contained within those sources, and it’ll cite where it’s taking information from. It can still hallucinate, but you can quickly check whether the info is right by just looking at the part of the text it’s citing. As a college student, I use it a lot to study and prepare myself for exams, and it’s one AI product none of the other big players have attempted to replicate.

We don’t have any specifics on how this app will look once it’s released, but Google might be working on a native app similar to the Gemini app. We’ll have to wait and see—this could either be imminent or it could be a few months away from release. With how quickly Google has been at releasing new AI stuff, we’d bet it won’t take too long.

Source: Google (X/Twitter) via 9to5Google