Writing a paper? Google’s NotebookLM research assistant can now do the source gathering for you

Google's fantastic NotebookLM tool stops making you do the legwork of tracking down source material.

Apr 2, 2025 - 21:22

Writing a paper? Google’s NotebookLM research assistant can now do the source gathering for you

NotebookLM is a powerful research tool that excels at summarizing dense source material.
So far, users have had to upload their own collection of source documents for NotebookLM to refer to.
Google is now letting NotebookLM track down sources itself with a new Discover button.

Google has introduced a lot of new AI-powered tools over the course of the past year or so, but NotebookLM has easily got to be one of our favorites. Its podcast-like Audio Overviews quickly emerged as its standout feature, and while we now have Audio Overviews baked into Gemini itself, there’s still plenty of great reasons to check out NotebookLM. We already loved the way it’s been able to chew through and condense complicated source material, and now the tool is getting even more flexible about its access to sources, thanks to the new Discover button.

So far, you’ve had to be very intentional about the sources you feed to NotebookLM. It’s like you’re starting with a blank slate, that you then begin filling in with documents you upload and share to the service. The kind of laser-focus that helps ensure has been one of NotebookLM’s big benefits, but it’s also something that can be a little limiting if you don’t have a suitable corpus to start with.