Google’s NotebookLM is already a great tool for research work, but the Mountain View tech giant continues to find new ways to make it even better. Last month, the company added a bunch of new tools to make NotebookLM your personalized PhD advisor. Now, the company has come up with another set of useful new NotebookLM features to make research work even easier.
Google plans to do it by helping users find and use resources more effectively. To make it easier to find sources, NotebookLM has a new tool called Deep Research. And to help you make better use of your resources, NotebookLM now has support for more file types.
As explained in its official blog post, it’s your “dedicated researcher,” making “organized,” “insightful” reports by browsing “hundreds of websites.” Not only that, but you can use it to search for specific places. You’ll also be able to import the report and its sources into your notebook and use useful NotebookLM’s capabilities, like Audio or Video overviews, to understand the topic better. Here is how to use the “Deep Research” feature:
- Open NotebookLM and go to the source panel.
- Select Deep Research.
- Enter the prompt and click the right arrow key.
It’ll take a few seconds to prepare the report, which will have “View detail” and “Import” options. Since it’s AI doing the search work on your behalf, don’t always completely trust what it does. So, instead of directly importing it after the report is generated, you should view it and add more sources if necessary before importing it to your notebook.
Additionally, you’ll see another option called “Fast Research” in the source panel. This is the same as the old “Discover sources” option, but with a new name that clearly mentions what it does. Use this if you want a quick search.
If that’s how you plan to do it, it’s also worth highlighting that you can now add sources with much fewer restrictions, because NotebookLM now supports more source file types. In addition to the existing ones, you’ll be able to upload Google Sheets, images, Microsoft Word documents (.docx), PDFs from Google Drive, and Drive files as URLs.
You may not see these changes on NotebookLM right now, as the company plans to make them available to everyone over the next week. However, the support image file type will arrive late. Google hasn’t specified a date for availability, but it’s planning to introduce the feature over the next few weeks.
