Google launches NotebookLM Business to make enterprise AI audio, text

Google will soon offer a paid version of its AI research tool NotebookLM, specifically targeting businesses. 

NotebookLM Business will have “enhanced features for businesses, universities, and organizations.” For now, access to NotebookLM Business is through a pilot program for early access to its features, training and email support. 

Google told VentureBeat in an email that participants in the NotebookLM Business pilot “will gain a significant advantage with enhanced capabilities designed to boost productivity and collaboration.” These capabilities include higher usage limits and new features such as customization and sharing notebooks with team members. The company said these features could unlock new use cases for businesses using the tool.

“We’ve seen this early feature streamline onboarding, shared understanding of complex projects, and building a centralized repository of your team’s collective intelligence all within a collaborative notebook environment,” a spokesperson said. 

Another feature that will be part of NotebookLM Business is Audio Overview, which lets users create a narrated study guide.

Google said the paid version will continue to have robust data privacy and security. 

NotebookLM, built with Gemini 1.5, lets people upload source material to “notebooks” to gather information and ask the Gemini chatbot questions about the research. First announced in July last year, NotebookLM became generally available in December. 

Google will also remove the “experimental” tag on the tool. 

NotebookLM product manager Raiza Martin previously told VentureBeat that the team saw many different uses for the platform, including some for enterprises. While NotebookLM was never intended for a specific audience, Martin said many researchers and students embraced the product. Many businesses have also begun using NotebookLM as a repository of information for teams. 

Google will announce general availability and pricing for NotebookLM Business later this year. 

Additional control over audio 

Along with announcing NotebookLM Business, Google updated the Audio Overview feature of NotebookLM. Audio Overview lets people generate podcasts about their research. Google characterized Audio Overview as a spoken research or study guide rather than a podcast. However, its first version featured two voices (one male, one female) conversing about the information in the notebook, reminding many of podcasts. 

Audio Overview proved popular among some users, with many posting their generated audio on social media. Martin had previously promised additional controls over Audio Overview and said the company’s research showed conversations helped people retain more information.

Users can now guide more of the conversation of Audio Overview, including prompting the model to focus on specific topics or levels of expertise. Audio Overviews will also continue to play while users query their sources or ask questions with its chat feature. 

I got to explore the updated capabilities of Audio Overviews early. In a notebook with sources around AI Orchestration, I told it to focus on the definition of orchestration and how different frameworks like LangChain work. The final product did talk about AI orchestration based on the different blog posts and YouTube videos I had uploaded. The two “hosts,” however, spoke about frameworks as if LangChain was the only orchestration framework out there. This might be a misunderstanding of my prompt where I specifically named LangChain because the source documents definitely talk about available tools. 

Google does point out that Audio Overviews “are generated discussions and are not a comprehensive or objective view of a topic.” It only takes into account information found in the uploaded source materials. 

Open NotebookLM, an open-source competitor to NotebookLM, launched last month and included an audio recap function. While Open NotebookLM does not have the same fact-checking capabilities as NotebookLM, it represents a shift in the ease of deploying complex AI-driven platforms.