I’ve been playing with NoteBookLM for six months or so. I’ve been really impressed with the product since its launch. Using your own documents as AI’s only source to pull from to answer your questions is powerful. Citations to AI’s pinpoint sources are provided in the responses, so you can fact-check. It’s like having a second, more powerful brain, which I love.

The product took off like wildfire when Google rolled out the audio overview feature, with which you can create a podcast featuring a conversation between two people based on the notes you upload. Last week, the company released a paid version, NoteBookLM Plus, for $20 per month and NoteBookLM Plus enterprise for large companies. Many other updates were also made.

One of my action items on this week’s accountability update is to evaluate the updated product and paid features. I’ve been playing around with it this week, and overall, I’m impressed with the updates. I think Google has a smash hit on its hands with this product. It’s going to bring personalized AI to the masses.

One thing I’ve been looking at hard is the UI update. The screen is divided into three sections: sources, chat, and studio. Sources and chat are straightforward—just what they sound like. Studio allows you to access the functions you can use to generate content (such as audio overview).

I wasn’t sure what to make of the UI at first glance. But after playing with it, I like its functionality. Because it shows the three-pane window on one screen, the product is much easier to use. I don’t have to switch between screens. I can minimize or expand each section as needed. And I can choose to expand information from all three sections if that’s helpful to my workflow.

The UI might not win style awards, but it wins on function. I think the NoteBookLM team is on to something with this new UI, and I bet we’ll see more AI applications borrow from it.

In case you’re interested in learning more about this UI change and seeing the UI in action, here’s a tweet from one of the founding NoteBookLM team members.