Andy Walker / Android Authority
TL;DR NotebookLM asks users to upload collections of documents which are organized into notebooks.
Right now, NotebookLM draws only from these notebooks when answering your questions.
Gemini support for notebook uploads may let users combine those resources with the wider internet.
NotebookLM is arguably one of Google’s most useful AI tools, and has helped introduce us to impressive features like Audio Overviews. Perhaps its greatest strength stems from how focused it is, pulling information from the resources you specifically provide it with, rather than broadly crawling the internet as a whole. And while we’re glad that it doesn’t look like NotebookLM is about to seriously change anything there, we have spotted one new way that might let us expand the horizons of our notebooks — just a little.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
As Google continues to feel out its approach to AI-fueled tools and services, one recurring theme we’ve seen involves a lot of after-the-fact overlap: Google likes to port many of its best features across to its other solutions. Audio Overviews are a prime example of that, and after debuting with NotebookLM, they’ve expanded to stuff like the Gemini app itself.
Today, we’re flipping that expansion on its head a bit as we spot the Gemini app for Android getting ready to import NotebookLM notebooks.
We’re spotting developers’ early work in this direction with the version 16.30.59.sa.arm64 beta build of the Google Android app, and while you won’t see any of this popping up just yet, we’ve coaxed out a preview of how parts of the interface could appear.
So far, we’re able to see the option to import a notebook, but that’s about as much as we’ve gotten out of it at the moment — the notebooks we’ve already created with NotebookLM don’t appear to populate the list where they should.
... continue reading