I believe most of us would have attended a lecture or a session and scribbled some text to keep note of important points. Or we may have attended some professional meeting and noted the salient points and action items. Or we may have referred multiple sources on a topic and kept some notes. In many similar occasions, we end up taking notes, points, action items etc. But quite often, we end up finding it difficult to build on those notes or forget the context of the matter or find it tough to recollect whom to assign what action item. There are scenarios where we remember few things but fail to recollect the entire discussion or lose the context.
At times, we would have wished if there was some help to recollect the discussion, summarize it and recreate the details. Or send the minutes the meeting with action items. Or add some related details from relevant sources to enhance the notes. Or hoped that there was some feature using which we can converse with such notes. Especially, with the advent of Gen AI, it seems there should be options.
Welcome to NoteBook LM, right from Google Labs. NoteBook LM is available over Web, powered by Generative AI. It takes rough notes as input, automatically organizes and summarizes them. It provides suggestions based on the notes added. It provides summary of the notes saved, provides answers to questions, and helps with ideas about the topic.
- Uses Generative AI to enhance the notes created.
- Provides creative suggestions based on the notes.
- Adds additional related information to the notes.
- Cites the sources when adding information to the notes.
Advantages:
Tags and Categories: It provides option to create tags and categories on the notes. It allows creating custom tags and categories. While categories help maintain the hierarchy, the tags can be used for grouping the notes and to search the content.
Collaboration: NoteBook LM supports collaboration with multiple other people at the same time. Users can connect with their teammates, friends, fellow students, colleagues on the same document and share ideas. It allows access controls so that collaborators can be provided with appropriate access be it Read, Write, comment.
Support for Images, Audio and Video: NoteBook LM supports multiple formats including text, Images, Audio and Video. So, feel free to create and save the notes, summaries in different formats. Use Speech to Text or Text to speech for ease of use. Use Images for better visualization and Video for creating tutorials or learning materials. It can create videos from the notes created by user.
Access on any device: NoteBook LM provides feature to access your notes on any device. It can be your laptop, desktop, your tab etc. It has a powerful sync feature which helps keep the notes in Sync across devices.
Access anywhere: NoteBook LM provides freedom to access your notes from anywhere. User may be at work, or at home or travelling. User can access the notes from anywhere on any device.
Drawbacks:
Supports only google docs: The current support is only for Google Docs. NoteBook LM needs to expand this support to other formats.
Early stage: NoteBook LM is currently in its early stages and available to a select set of users in US (at the time of writing this). There is a need to increase the features, decrease hallucination and handle IP and Data Privacy appropriately.
Conclusion:
NoteBook LM is a generative AI based, feature rich tool. Such Tools, applications and solutions provide option, not just for the enterprise, but also for other users to leverage Gen AI or Gen AI based tools to improve user experience, productivity and ease of use. While there is a need to increase the support other document types from the existing Google Docs, it is potentially a very good tool to be used for lot of Students, Trainers, Content Writers, Journalists and lot of other professionals.
