Google's NotebookLM can now aggregate YouTube videos and audio files

Extracting important insights from long YouTube videos or podcasts can be a tedious task for many, especially students, researchers, and working professionals.

While YouTube offers a wealth of educational content to its 2.4 billion users, it lacks built-in tools to efficiently summarize or organize this information, leaving users to manually search through lengthy media.

To address this issue, Google has released a major update to its NotebookLM tool that includes support for public YouTube videos and audio files.

Thanks to this update, users can now automatically create notes, summaries, and AI-powered discussions from both video and audio sources. By linking key concepts directly to video transcripts, NotebookLM aims to make it easier for users to access relevant information without having to watch entire videos.

For audio files such as lectures and podcasts, the tool also generates detailed study guides that could make it easier to navigate and review key points.

This extension builds on NotebookLM's previous capabilities, which supported formats such as PDFs, Google Docs, Web URLs and Google Slides and is based on the Gemini 1.5 Pro model.

With the new update, NotebookLM users worldwide can easily upload a YouTube link or audio file and the AI-powered tool will generate structured notes linked to the corresponding transcript. Additionally, NotebookLM's built-in YouTube player allows users to watch videos and take notes at the same time, promising a seamless research experience.

Google has also expanded the Audio Overview feature it launched earlier this month to help users create AI-hosted, podcast-like discussions based on their uploaded content. Now, Audio Overview enables faster sharing of these AI-hosted discussions via shareable URLs, although this feature remains unavailable to Workspace users.

Google's NotebookLM now lets you convert notes into AI-generated audio

The app now supports Google Slides and web URLs in addition to traditional formats such as Google Docs, PDFs and text files.

Although these features are still experimental, they represent an important step toward Google's broader goal of making research more interactive and productive through AI.

NotebookLM fills a critical gap in the way users manage large amounts of information and is becoming an essential tool for students, researchers and professionals alike.