Google has expanded NoteBookLM Plus, a paid version of AI-based note-taking and research assistant, to individual users who subscribe to the Google One Premium plan.
First announced in December after previous pilots, the Notebooklm Plus offers higher usage restrictions and premium features. This includes the free version of Notebooklm, or 500 notebooks and 300 sources per notebook, up to 500 chat queries, and five times the usage of the 20 audio generation per day.
Individual subscribers now have access to all of these features in Google One AI Premium Tier. This costs $20 a month. Additionally, Google has introduced a 50% discount for students in the US for over 18 years. We offer an AI premium of $9.99 per month.
“We’re committed to providing a range of services that are important to us,” said Kelly Schaefer, director of product and domain leads at Google Labs. In an interview.
Started as a project in 2023, NoteBookLM attracted more attention after the debut of its Audio Overview feature last September. The service, which allows users to generate podcast-like audio conversations based on content they uploaded, has led companies like ElevenLabs and Meta to copy ideas.
Meanwhile, Google’s offering was associated with regular updates, including the ability to guide the audio conversations generated by AI.
Schaefer told TechCrunch that Google plans to enhance Notebooklm’s audio overview by supporting other languages beyond English.
“We’re thinking about ways to prioritize languages, and most importantly, just like the current audio overview, they’re really authentic, seamless and natural. I’m thinking of ways to check it out,” she said.
Schaefer has not disclosed the Gemini AI model that Google uses for NotebookLM, but it says that the underlying model is currently the same for both Plus and non-premium users. Google Labs experiments with a variety of Gemini variations, constantly using “the latest and best matching Gemini models for specific tasks at hand.”
The team is also working to bring NotebookLM to mobile devices via a dedicated app, Schaefer told us, but did not share a specific timeline.
“We want mobile to feel in many ways in many ways, similar to desktop experiences, but we also tailor it to the most common use cases for mobile,” Schafer said.
Additionally, the company is exploring ways for NotebookLM to leverage the emergence of inference models to tackle thought and reasoning experiences.
Notebooklm Plus is expanded to individual subscribers of the Google One AI Premium Plan, but brings access to Gemini Advanced, Gmail’s Gemini, Docs, and 2TB of cloud storage access, while Schaefer has teams said it will continue to support non-paying users.
“We hope that people will get a great experience with Notebooklm, whether they’re free or paid. It’s very important to us that NotebookLM’s free experience is excellent. So, we’re thinking more about how we can provide more to plus users, reducing the free user experience,” she said.
Google has not revealed the actual number of users or the size of the team for Notebooklm, and is simply saying it has grown over time.
However, data from market intelligence provider SimserWeb suggests that AI assistants have seen 28.18 million visits in the past three months.
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