Google debuts NotebookLM for enterprises
In October, Google started piloting a version of NotebookLM, its viral AI note-taking and research app, aimed at businesses. Now, the company’s bringing NotebookLM to the enterprise, complete with work-focused security and privacy features.
NotebookLM for enterprises — which Google’s dubbing NotebookLM Plus — delivers the same experience as the consumer version, but with added controls for access and data management. Employees can upload data and files to create notebooks, podcast-like audio summaries (called Audio Overviews), and more, and search across and share these projects with org members.
Additional benefits include five times more podcast-like audio summaries, notebooks, and data sources per notebook; the ability to customize the style and tone of AI-generated notebook responses; and shared team notebooks with usage analytics.
NotebookLM for enterprises is a part of Agentspace, Google Cloud’s new platform for AI-powered “agents.” It’s launching today in early access.
“Millions of users have used NotebookLM to make sense of complex information,” Raj Pai, VP of Cloud AI at Google, said during a press briefing. “And with Agentspace integration, we’re bringing these popular capabilities to our customers, meeting their compliance security and privacy requirements — and we’re connecting them with enterprise data and applications.”
In Agentspace, NotebookLM lives alongside agents that can analyze documents and emails, translate files, and bring in data from third-party repositories. Users can launch and search for agents from a single interface, and soon, they’ll be able to build custom agents using a low-code tool, Google says.
For business, school, university, and enterprise NotebookLM users who’d prefer not to sign up for Agentspace, NotebookLM Plus is also available in Google Workspace. As an alternative, org users can purchase NotebookLM Plus separately via Google Cloud.
Starting early next year, NotebookLM Plus will also come to individual users subscribed to Google’s $20-a-month Google One AI Premium plan.
NotebookLM is one of Google’s most popular AI-powered products in recent memory.
Months after its launch, NotebookLM became the “it” thing on social media for its audio-generation feature, which creates a realistic-sounding, back-and-forth dialogue between two synthetic podcast hosts from a source video or audio file, URL or document.
NotebookLM’s podcast-like audio generator has since been cloned many times over, and the key leaders behind the app have left the company as well. But Google continues to update NotebookLM with new functionality.
Case in point, on Friday, NotebookLM got a redesign that reorganizes the app’s tools across three panels: a Sources panel for managing imported info, a Chat panel for discussing that info through a conversational interface, and a Studio panel that lets users create things (e.g. study guides, briefing docs, and podcast-like audio) with a single click.
Elsewhere in NotebookLM, a new, experimental feature lets users “join” the conversation in podcast-like audio by asking the synthetic hosts for more details or to expand on a concept. Here’s how it works:
- A user creates a new Audio Overview.
- They tap the “Interactive mode (beta)” button
- While listening, they tap Join. A host will call on them.
- A user asks a question. The hosts will respond with a personalized answer based on their data sources.
- After answering, the hosts will resume their back-and-forth banter.
Google notes that the feature, which is only available in English for now, won’t work with existing Audio Overviews, and that the hosts may pause awkwardly before responding or “occasionally introduce inaccuracies.”
As always, it behooves any user to fact-check answers from AI-powered tools — podcast-like or no.
