Google has expanded NotebookLM Plus, a paid version of its AI-based note-taking and research assistant, to individual users subscribed to the Google One AI Premium plan — almost two months after its debut for enterprises on Google Cloud and via Google Workspace.
First announced in December after an earlier pilot, NotebookLM Plus offers higher usage limits and premium features. This includes 5 times more usage than the free version of NotebookLM, or 500 notebooks and 300 sources per notebook as well as up to 500 chat queries, and 20 audio generations per day.
Individual subscribers can now access all these features with the Google One AI Premium tier, which costs $20 a month. Additionally, Google has introduced a 50% discount for students above 18 years in the U.S. — offering the One AI Premium at a monthly charge of $9.99.
“We’ve always wanted to get NotebookLM Plus out to enterprises and consumers, and have seen really a ton of interest from consumers, and in particular students from the beginning,” said Kelly Schaefer, director of product and domain lead at Google Labs, in an interview.
Launched as a project in 2023, NotebookLM gained wider attention following the debut of its Audio Overviews feature in September last year. The service, which allows users to generate podcast-like audio conversations based on the content they upload, led companies like ElevenLabs and Meta to copy the idea.
Meanwhile, Google’s offering remained relevant with regular updates, including the ability to guide AI-generated audio conversations.
Schaefer told TechCrunch that Google is planning to enhance Audio Overviews in NotebookLM with support for other languages beyond English.
“We are thinking about how to prioritize the languages and then, most importantly, how to make sure that they feel really genuine and just as seamless and natural as our current Audio Overviews do,” she said.
Schaefer did not disclose the Gemini AI models Google uses for NotebookLM, but said the underlying model is currently the same for both Plus and non-premium users. Google Labs experiments with different variants of Gemini and always uses the “latest and best matching Gemini models for the specific task at hand,” she noted.
The team is also working to bring NotebookLM to mobile devices through a dedicated app, Schaefer told us, but didn’t share a specific timeline.
“We want mobile to feel in many ways similar to the desktop experience but also really tailor it for the use cases that are most common for mobile,” Schaefer said.
In addition, the company is exploring how NotebookLM could leverage the emergence of reasoning models and work on thinking and reasoning experiences.
While NotebookLM Plus is now expanded to individual subscribers on the Google One AI Premium plan, which brings access to Gemini Advanced, Gemini in Gmail, Docs, and 2TB of cloud storage access, Schaefer stated the team will continue to support non-paying users.
“We want folks to get an excellent experience on NotebookLM, whether they’re free or paid, and it’s very important to us that the NotebookLM free experience is excellent. So, we’re thinking more about how we offer even more to the Plus users versus degrading any experience for free users,” she said.
Google has not disclosed the actual number of users on NotebookLM nor the size of its team, only saying that it’s grown over time.
However, data from market intelligence provider Similarweb suggests the AI assistant has seen 28.18 million visits in the last three months, with almost 9 million in January alone.
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