NotebookLM Update (Dec 2024) 📝 3 Key Features & NotebookLM Plus 👀

hello my name is Callum also known as W loots and welcome to today's video on the update to notebook LM of December 13th 2024 while Google mentions that notebook LM gets a new look there's also one feature in particular that I'm quite excited about that Google didn't mention in their list of updates so I'm excited to dive into this and show you the updated ways that I'm using notbook LM and also get into notbook LM plus so the first thing that Google mentions is that notebook LM gets a new look they've changed it to have

three main areas with a source panel a chat panel and a studio panel let's take a look I'm going to go into my molecular zcast and notebook and you can see right away that it's split into sources chat and studio so effectively what's happened here is they've separated the chat and the notebook guide section or what is formally known as The Notebook guide now it's referred to as the studio section so the chat is its own separate panel and the studio includes the audio overview the AI podcast generator along with adding notes and the notebook

guide automated node Generation The Source panel is exactly the same as before and the chat operates almost exactly the same as well I personally like this new look with the three panels it feels very clean I can minimize either side so that I can focus on one panel or another and it just makes it really intuitive to move between the source the chat and the studio that's the first update so as I just mentioned the user interface hasn't really changed all that much in particular the source and the chat is almost identical so I'm not

going to go into depth on how this can be used with with specific use cases at the moment because I've already done that with my how to use notebook LM video that a lot of people have been finding incredibly helpful including Google themselves so I recommend checking out that video if you're interested in understanding how to use notebook LM more but that said there's a couple other features that have changed so let's take a look at those the second update is that you can now join and interact with AI hosts in the audio overview section

so this is where on the side you can see that there's an option to generate an AI overview so I'm going to click load from the previous conversation that I made in one of my earlier videos and now rather than just hitting play and just downloading the copy of the audio overview there's an interactive mode so if I go here and click on interactive mode which is in beta and allow the microphone and you can see that this opens up a new panel where I can now interrupt the audio overview to ask a question interject

or make a request to the host and one thing that's very important to note is that my voice and transcribed interactions with the post will not be stored so this is just relieving that I'm not giving Google access to my voice when using the audio overview interaction and also one thing that's important to note by clicking the share or download buttons it just downloads the original audio overview it doesn't include the injection that I made by joining the conversation so just as one idea for how this could be used if I am using the audio

overview to review my textbook as a student or review meeting notes and I come across some aspect of the podcast that I'm I'm not understanding I can just quickly click join and jump into the conversation and ask the host to focus on a particular element before having them return back to the regularly scheduled podcast that they're generating and now before we get into notebook LM plus and the limitations that have been applied to notebook LM the free version and the other benefits that you can get from notebook LM plus there's one other feature I wanted

to point out that Google didn't note and that feature feature is that you're able to use your saved notes as sources you can convert them into sources so if I click on a note here that's my conversation that I previously had with notebook LM about my molecular zle Casten system which I actually used to create a video about the zle Casten no taking system I really emphasized that there were two interconnected boxes that I was using as part of this system so after I've gone through and had a conversation with notebook LM and I've iterated

and recalibrated the output that the chat is giving me I can save that chat response as a note but now I can convert that note into a source and by clicking convert to Source it gets added to the source section on the left side here so what this means is that I can now query my previously saved notes inside of the chat panel by adding it as a source so you could do this with as many notes as you wanted to if you go through and you have a long conversation with notebook LM and you

finally get the output that you're looking for some particular style or the answer that you've been struggling to find you can now save that answer as a source and then perhaps use it as a template within your chat for the future for example I just made a video on using notebook LM as a social media generator which I will be publishing soon and after iterating and going through and having a conversation with notebook LM I finally got the style of social media output I was looking for I could then save that style as a new

note and then convert that note to a source to use as a template for the chat for future social media Creations so I think that's actually a really underrated power in the notebook LM update is that you're able to add these notes as sources and then chat with those sources again okay now we get to the final update of December 13th 2024 which is notebook LM plus and at the moment this is only available for organizations if we go to notebook lm's website and go from the general overview which is the free version we can

go to notebook LM plus and it says that this is for power users teams and organizations who want the most capable AI research assistance so I'll get more into each of these specific features but the key thing to note here is that you get much more audio overviews notebooks queries and sources per notebook also you get additional privacy and security which I talked more about in my notebook LM privacy versus confidentiality video where I refer to notebook LM plus as notebook LM for business because I think that was the original name that they were using

for this type of Premium subscription model but let me walk through quickly the differences between notebook LM and notebook LM plus so the free version of notebook LM has everything that we've been dealing with so far and everything that I've already included in my how to use notebook LM video so if you're looking to just use this as a free version I highly recommend checking out my original video because not much has changed aside from those features that I just mentioned previously the changed UI the ability to interact with the hosts and then the ability

to convert notes into sources one thing that changed with the addition of notebook LM plus is that there's now a limitation on how much you can use the free version of notebook LM so for example with notebook LM you can have up to 100 notebooks each notebook can have up to 50 sources each of the sources can be 500,000 words long but all users start with up to 50 chat queries and three audio Generations per day previously this was unlimited you could chat as much as you wanted and you could have as many audio Generations

per day as you wanted but if you upgrade to notebook LM plus you get five times more usage you get 500 notebooks 300 sources per notebook and the daily query limits increase with 500 chat queries and 20 audio Generations per day so this 300 sources is actually pretty huge because now we can have 300 sources that have up to 500,000 words each so that means we'll have a context window of 150 million Words which is pretty massive that's a that's a lot of information to be able to add in there so if you think that

you're going to be a power user where you're using notebook LM regularly where you have a ton of queries per day you might be interested in the plus version but personally for myself I tend tend to be very careful about my prompting where I have nowhere near 50 prompts per day when I'm using notebook LM I probably have 15 to 20 Max and then usually at the end of my session I'll generate an audio overview so I also don't think I'm going to have an issue with the three audio overview Generations per day that said

there is an element of notebook LM plus that interests me a lot which is the sharing a chat only notebook so what that means is that I'd be able to go to my notebook that I've created here that I've carefully curated all my sources and added my own notes and had my conversations and then created notes from my conversations and converted the notes into sources and I could share this with people in a way that they have only chat access they can't go in and edit the sources and they can't go in and edit the

notes they can just have a conversation with my curated information that I've included in my knowledge base of this particular notebook so I think that's a pretty cool feature because I could for example do a ton of research and curate my sources very carefully which is what I tend to do and then I could share a ChatOn notebook with my YouTube members the people who subscribe to my YouTube channel the people who perhaps would subscribe to my hypers sub or some other membership platform I can give access to my notebooks to people who support me

and this just gives me another incentive to be very careful with the information that I'm curating within notebook LM that's an exciting update to notebook LM plus that you can have that chat only share and along with that you can also introduce Advanced chat settings so you can have different styles of response by modifying for example the chat to be a guide or an analyst or generating a custom style based on how I'm using it I can control the output length to make it longer or shorter so I think that's also going to be very

valuable in the future and along with the ChatOn notebook you can have notebook analytics so once I've shared my notebook with people I can start tracking how they've been using it in the sense that I can track how many users have accessed it and how many queries they've made so if I'm sharing a ton of notebooks to my YouTube subscribers or to people who are in my YouTube membership I can start tracking which notebooks are the most effective based on the usage so again I think that's pretty cool but that said my understanding is that

at the moment personal Gmail accounts can only share a notebook with up to 50 other individual users and the Enterprise users can share it with people who are part of the same organization if we go back to the notebook LM plus page you can see that right now notebook LM plus is only available for business Enterprise and education through Google workspace and the consumer part so the individual is not out yet that's coming in early 2025 as part of a package deal with Google one so I plan on trying it out to see how those

updated features could perhaps improve my AI workflow help augment my personal Knowledge Management System in particular the chat only interface to add to my communities and advanced chat settings to modify how I'm able to chat with the notebook itself so there you have it we have this updated user interface we have the interactive mode with the audio overview we have the ability to convert sources to notes and we also have notebook LM plus where we can share a notebook with specific people and customize how we chat with the notebook LM that is the update to

notebook LM of December 13th 2024 as I mentioned earlier if you're interested in going deeper into how notebook LM can be used I have a how to use notebook LM video that goes much more into depth and I also have a couple more videos on how to use notebook LM in particular how you can go deeper with the AI podcast the audio overview function ality where you can really start to use notebook LM to operate in multimodal formats you can download an audio overview and then go for a walk I also walk through the privacy

policy in Notebook LM so that you can have a better idea on how to keep your information safe so I recommend checking out these videos If you're looking to go deeper into notebook LM and as I mentioned I'm considering bringing in some elements of notebook LM plus once it becomes available to me for my YouTube members so I recommend checking out my channel and subscribing to stay up to date on how I'm planning on using this software if you found this video helpful I would love if you would please consider subscribing as your support really

means a lot you can also please consider sharing this video with someone else that may find this helpful as word of mouth is by far the best way for me to grow my channel thanks again for watching and I will see you in the next video