Google significantly upgraded its AI research assistant, NotebookLM, launching dedicated Android and iOS mobile apps. This development directly addresses user requests for on-the-go access. It allows for easier note management and source interaction from smartphones and tablets. The move enhances NotebookLM’s utility for students and researchers.
Furthering its evolution, Google announced upcoming “Video Overviews” for NotebookLM at its I/O 2025 conference. The feature is expected to transform multimedia content like notes, PDFs, and images into visual presentations. Google stated on its official blog that these updates, powered by Gemini models, aim to make research more intuitive.
These enhancements are pivotal, making NotebookLM more dynamic for research and learning. Mobile apps provide practical, ubiquitous access. The new overview features signal Google’s commitment to intuitive information consumption across diverse formats.
Delving Into the Mobile Experience
The new native NotebookLM applications offer a streamlined user experience. A homepage organizes notebooks with filters like “Recent” and “Shared.” The apps feature system-aware light and dark modes. Notebook cards display names, emojis, source counts, dates, and play buttons for “Audio Overviews.”
These podcast-style summaries of NotebookLM are generated by AI virtual hosts, support background playback and offline downloading. Users can also “Join” these AI hosts in a beta feature to ask follow-up questions. Adding sources such as PDFs, websites, and YouTube videos is facilitated by a “Create new” button. Crucially, the app integrates with Android and iOS share sheets for quick content addition from other apps.
Navigation within notebooks uses a bottom bar for “Sources,” “Chat Q&A,” and “Studio (tools).” However, while phone and tablet interfaces are supported, the app’S design does not take advantage of Material 3, Google’s open-source design system for building beautiful, usable products. The new native apps replace the prior Progressive Web App (PWA). The mobile interface of NotebookLM looks clean and adding sources works quite intuitively.
The upcoming Video Overviews feature, announced at Google I/O 2025, will be a major step towards more visual information synthesis and allow users to convert complex documents into easily digestible visual formats. They will build upon the existing Audio Overviews, which have also seen improvements.
Prior to the mobile launch, NotebookLM’s web platform saw additions like a ‘Discover sources’ feature in April and Audio Overviews expanded to support over 50 languages. Google indicated this was an initial version to be refined based on feedback. The platform now also offers more flexibility in selecting audio summary lengths—default, longer, or shorter—tailoring content consumption. Before that, a Mind Maps features for visual research was added in March.
Availability, Context, and Broader AI Landscape
NotebookLM employs a freemium model. A standard free tier provides significant capabilities. For more intensive use, NotebookLM Plus offers expanded limits and is bundled with the Google One AI Premium subscription, which became available to individual consumers in February 2025. The platform originated as Project Tailwind at Google I/O 2023. Its global web launch occurred in June 2024. NotebookLM is now available to users aged 18 and over in more than 180 regions where the Gemini API is supported.
Google emphasizes its data privacy commitment, affirming its policy that user data remains theirs, as detailed on Google’s support page. This data is not used for training external AI models without explicit consent.
The evolution of NotebookLM occurs within a dynamic AI field. An open-source alternative, Open NotebookLM, was launched in October 2024, focusing on PDF-to-podcast conversion. Internal Google discussions regarding open-source AI competition have also surfaced. A leaked memo from May 2023 reportedly offered a pessimistic view, though Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, publicly disagreed with this assessment.
