NotebookLM

“Before we did the IO announcement in 23, we'd already done a lot of studies. And one of the first things that I realized was the first thing anybody ever typed was summarize the thing, right? Summarize the document. And it was like half like a test and half ju…”

“Like we work with the DeepMind audio folks pretty closely. So they're always cooking up new techniques to like get better, more human-like audio. And then Gemini, 1.5 is really, really good at absorbing long context. So we sort of like generally put those thin…”

“I mean, we have like a really, really good like character designer on our team.”

“I just checked in on a Notebook LM Discord. 65,000 people.”

“Humor is contextual also, like super contextual is what we're realizing. So we're not prompting for humor, but we're prompting for maybe a lot of other things that are bringing out that humor.”

“Notebook.ln can handle up to 50 sources, 500,000 words each, like you're not going to be able to jam all of that into like the context window.”

“I think one thing we find often is if there's just too much agreement between people, like that's not Fun to listen to. So there needs to be some sort of tension and build up, you know, withholding information, for example, like as you listen to a story unfold…”

“The audio model is definitely trying to mimic like certain human intonations and like sort of natural, like, you know, breathing and pauses and like laughter and things like that. But yeah, in generating like the text, we also have to sort of give signals on l…”

“We had this idea that you could highlight the text in your source passage, and then you could transform it. And nobody was really using it. And it was like a very complicated piece of our architecture, and it's very hard to continue supporting it in the contex…”

“We didn't actually start out thinking this would live in notebook, right? Like notebook was sort of, we, Built this demo out independently, tried out like a few different sort of sources that the main idea was like go from some sort of sources and transform it…”

“I think at the same time, right, there are a lot of developers that are interested in using the same technology to build their own thing. We're going to look into that. How soon that's going to be ready, I can't really comment, but these are the things that li…”

“I think you just have to be really opinionated. I think that sometimes if you are, your intuition is just sharper and you can move a lot faster on the product because it's like, if you hold that bar high, right? Like if you think about like the iterative cycle…”

“There is a transform that needs to happen. That is inherently editorial. And I think this is where like that two person persona, right? Dialogue model, they have takes on the material that you've presented. That's where it really sort of like brings the conten…”

“So I guess high level, like we're definitely working on adding more languages. That's like top priority. We're going to start small, but like theoretically we should be able to cover like most languages pretty soon.”

“I think that's what Karpathy did, right? Like he has now a Spotify channel called histories of mysteries, which is basically like, he just took like interesting stuff from Wikipedia and made audio overviews out of it.”

“We're actively, that's one of the things we're actively prioritizing. Actually, one of the interesting things is now we're like, why would anyone want to do that? Right? Like, what are the actual, like kind of going back to sort of having a strong POV about th…”

“We have some early signal that says it's a really good hook. But people stay for the other features.”

“Interacting with a chatbot is sort of novel at first, but it's not interesting. Right. And it's like humans are what makes interacting with chatbots interesting. It's like, ha ha ha, I'm going to try to trick it. It's like, that's interesting. Spell strawberry…”

“That was a Steven catch. Like not give them names.”

“I think, honestly, like our fastest way that we've been able to find out if like the servers are down or there's just an influx of people being like, it says system unable to answer, anybody else getting this? And I'm like, all right, let's go. And it actually…”

“So if you have a PDF that's purely images, it will recognize it”

“So when you upload audio today, we just transcribe it. So it is quite lossy in the sense that like, we don't transcribe like the emotion from that as a source.”

“And then I had this realization of like, maybe Steven is the product. Maybe the work is to take Steven's expertise and bring it to like everyday people that could really benefit from this.”