Comment by xnx
14 hours ago
In a sea of similar tools, Google seems to have struck on something semi-viral with NotebookLM. Output can be mediocre, but with the bar for many podcasts being set at "read pages from Wikipedia", that's not bad at all for zero effort.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=NotebookLM...
The 100 baseline on that graph is the highest attention the term has received, and it correlated with a launch and has since decreased.
Google never has problems with first the first few millions for consumer-launched tools. They have problems with the first few millions of net profit almost 100% of the time and shut it down a few years later.
But I do agree this is a good play for Google, it plays to their strengths.
> The 100 baseline on that graph is the highest attention the term has receive
Good point. I couldn't come up with a well-enough known competing tool to compare against.
I really wish it had more voices, notebooklm-guy and notebooklm-girl get tiring
Definitely hear what you are saying but I personally think it is for the best that they are instantly recognizable as NotebookLM podcasters. Especially as this makes the rounds on the internet. If you could manipulate the voices it would just make it more challenging to detect if a "Podcast" is using this tool.
Now that NotebookLM has gone from "small experiment" to "moderate viral success", I expect all kinds of roadmaps are being drawn up to use it to hook users into the broader Google AI ecosystem (e.g. automatically add images and illustrations by Imagen 3, etc.