Generative AI is useful for so much more than just making up dangerous misinformation and trying to trick you into eating glue. It can also be tasked as a fetch monkey to bring you research that you can then (hopefully) verify before you use it.
That’s the role of Google’s NotebookLM. It aggregates information from across the internet’s websites, documents (such as PDFs) you upload, YouTube videos, and more and provides summaries based on all the information you feed into it. It can even create podcasts for you to listen to if you prefer to get your information read to you.
The downside? You had to use it on a Chromebook. NotebookLM arrives on the iOS and Android operating systems on May 20, and you can “pre-order” it now, although it’s free and I think Google is abusing that term. Oh well. It’s harmless.
from chromebook to mobile
Google’s answer to Apple’s and the PC makers’ dominance of the laptop space was the Chromebook, an admirable effort at a low-cost, simplified take on the format, but it never really took off in the face of steadily falling PC prices and tablets that, with keyboard add-ons, filled the role of stripped-down computing device quite well.
Not to shit on Chromebooks too much, but unless you were a nonprofit or working from within some type of school, you probably didn’t own a Chromebook. All that unpleasantness is behind us, though. Now you can use it on the mobile platform you probably do have.
Once it launches on May 20, you can download it for iOS on the Apple App Store and for Android on the Google Play Store. As long as it does a decent job at being able to tell real information from fake, it could be a powerhouse tool.
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