Google has just made NotebookLM available in France, a brand new free online tool capable of synthesizing dozens of sources and documents for you. And the result is impressive to say the least.
If Google was historically a search engine, the company has become much more a long time ago. The “Mountain View firm”, as it is often called, has indeed established itself as a powerful and essential player in several essential areas of consumer computing, such as Internet browsing with Chrome, email with Gmail, office automation with Google Docs or even mobile telephony with Android, the operating system used on billions of smartphones, to name just a few examples among many others.
And the American giant could well be on the verge of conquering a new segment and establishing itself as a new benchmark in the field of productivity with its new powerful application: NotebookLM, an online note-taking service powered by artificial intelligence, but in reality much more than that. And what’s more, completely free!
Google NotebookLM: an app between super assistant, teacher and notebook
Before the astronomical amount of information, knowledge and data accessible in a few clicks on the Web, note-taking and knowledge organization applications became particularly popular. OneNote, Obsidian, Loqseq and QOwnNotes are all powerful and very effective tools for accumulating information, structuring your knowledge, organizing your work or stimulating your creativity. With the galloping democratization of Large Language Models and artificial intelligence tools, there was no doubt that the major digital players were going to integrate these technologies into note-taking applications, and this is what Google did with NotebookLM.
The application, available in French and completely free, presents itself as an online service to generate notes from a set of sources chosen by the user: PDF files, Google Docs documents (or converted Office) or even pages Entire web, any information source containing text and images can be added to a NotebookLM notebook. Once the documentary corpus has been created, it is possible to explore, synthesize and reformulate it using natural language queries using Gemini, Google’s “large language model”… but not only . NotebookLM also helps automatically generate comprehensive tables of contents and study guides from selected sources.
Thus, to immerse yourself in the discovery of a new field of knowledge or the learning of a new technique, such as a programming language, a foreign language, a scientific discovery or a text of law, it is enough to bring together a set sources of information (serious and quality), add them to the NotebookLM notebook, then ask questions to the application to generate structured responses. The advantage compared to other artificial intelligence tools here is being able to carefully select its sources of information, before avoiding the answers being based on questionable content and limiting the famous hallucinations of Large Language Models. . The other great strength of the tool is that the generated responses systematically refer to the original content of the information sources, which makes it possible to explore large documents very quickly and efficiently.
The tool does have some limitations, but they are honestly not restrictive. In each notebook, it is possible to add up to 50 sources of information, each containing up to 500,000 words; suffice to say that it is possible to build up very large documentary corpora before seeing the end of them. The potential of this application therefore seems particularly interesting for many people, such as students, researchers or journalists of course, but also for all those who have to work with multiple documentary sources as part of their profession, this which represents a lot of people.
NotebookLM is currently completely free, available without limitation of use and Google has not given any sign of wanting to restrict access to it. However, we must remain cautious with the Mountain View firm, which is unfortunately well known for launching many new products and services in all directions, then stopping them overnight. There also remains the subject of confidentiality of data transmitted on NotebookLM.
The company states upon opening the application that the data sources, user queries and notes generated are not used to train its artificial intelligence models, but specifies that all content passing through NotebookLM can be reread by human beings, in an effort to improve the service. As with all tools of the same type, you will therefore have to remain careful and take care not to record personal, sensitive or confidential data in your various notebooks.