Google adds new AI features to Gmail and NotebookLM ๐ฅ
Google Labs has announced new updates to NotebookLM, a powerful AI-driven note-taking and research assistant. These updates aim to improve the capabilities of researchers, learners, content creators, and other users by providing more versatile ways to process, analyze, and collaborate using various types of media.
Key Updates
New Source Types: Users can now directly upload YouTube video URLs and audio files (.mp3/.wav) to NotebookLM. This feature allows for the analysis of video essays, lectures, and class recordings, making it easier to summarize key points and arguments from educational content.
Easy Sharing: The new sharing feature enables users to share Audio Overviews with colleagues or classmates via a public URL. This makes collaboration and discussion of key insights more accessible, even for users without a NotebookLM account.
๐กTry an example shared URL with an audio overview
Additional Points
Educators and students are already leveraging NotebookLM in various ways:
Studying with AI: Students can upload PDF readings, class notes, and transcripts to create comprehensive study guides and cross-reference insights from different sources.
Engaging Students: Educators use Audio Overviews to help students understand class assignments better by creating notebooks from slides, assignment rubrics, and other project sources.
Bridging Gaps: NotebookLM is used in Master's programs to guide executive learners back into scholarly reading practices, making dense academic texts more accessible.
Transcript Requirement: YouTube videos require available transcripts to be processed by NotebookLM, ensuring that the AI can accurately analyze and summarize the content.
Future Developments: The new sharing feature is particularly beneficial for creating AI-generated audio content. It would be cool if in the future it will be possible to generate audio overviews in a video form with waves.
Google Labs is an incubator created by Google to test and publicly demonstrate new projects, serving as a playground for adventurous users to experiment with prototypes and provide feedback directly to the engineers who developed them.
NotebookLM is an experimental AI-first notebook from Google Labs that uses the power of language models to help users gain critical insights from their existing content, functioning as a virtual research assistant that can summarize facts, explain complex ideas, and brainstorm new connections based on the sources selected by the user.
Google Launches Gemini's Contextual Smart Replies in Gmail
Google is enhancing Gmail's smart replies with a Gemini-powered update, offering more personalized responses. This update, available on Android and iOS, tailors replies to better match the context of email threads.
Details:
The update considers the full email thread to provide responses that better capture the intent of the conversation.
Users can preview suggested replies and choose the one that fits their style. Options can be edited before sending or sent as is.
The feature aims to save time by offering more varied automated responses, complete with greetings and signoffs, beyond the usual quick replies.
The new contextual Smart Replies feature is rolling out to Gemini Business, Enterprise, Education, Education Premium, and Google One AI Premium subscribers. It's currently only available in English and builds on the smart replies introduced in 2017.