Google on Thursday announced two big upgrades for the NotebookLM AI research tool, which might satisfy the requests of some fans of the popular generative AI tool. NotebookLM can now employ a Deep Research mode similar to what’s available in Gemini, AI Mode, and Google Finance. Additionally, NotebookLM will let users upload more file types, a feature that can be useful for feeding your own data into NotebookLM before asking it to generate a report. Specifically, NotebookLM will now support spreadsheets saved in Google Sheets, PDFs from Google Drive, and Microsoft Word Documents (.docx). Also, users can add Drive files to NotebookLM as URLs via copy-paste, with NotebookLM supporting multiple links separated by commas. The feature is similar to pasting a link to a website or YouTube video in NotebookLM when asking the AI to create a notebook on a particular subject.
The ability to easily upload large data batches saved in multiple file types will come in handy in NotebookLM, but the Deep Research feature might be even more exciting to some users. When using Deep Research, NotebookLM will create a research plan and browse hundreds of websites on your behalf. After that, it’ll create “an organized, insightful, source-grounded report,” according to a Google blog post.
How to use Deep Research in NotebookLM
Google also says that Deep Research in NotebookLM is different from other places. The report is just “the beginning,” according to Google. Users can add the report and its sources to a notebook and continue to add other sources while Deep Research is working in the background. This process should help users “assemble a rich knowledge base on any topic,” without leaving the app.
To get started with Deep Research in NotebookLM, you’ll have to start a search in the app and select “Web” as a source in the source panel. After that, you have a choice to make between Fast Research and Deep Research. The first will give you a fast result, showing you sources that you can import into the notebook. The Deep Research option is the better choice for a more in-depth search where the AI looks for high-quality sources. This process can run in the background, as you continue working on other tasks inside NotebookLM.
The new NotebookLM features Google unveiled on Thursday will be available to users within a week. The update follows a few significant NotebookLM updates that Google released last month. Google added Nano Banana support to NotebookLM Video Overviews in mid-October. Late last month, Google increased the chat feature’s context window to 1 million tokens, giving the chat feature a six-times longer conversation memory and improving responses by 50%.
