Chromebooks are quietly getting a major brain boost

Chromebooks are not forgotten - in fact, they're getting smarter. A fresh wave of AI features is on the way, and at the heart of it is NotebookLM, Google's document-savvy assistant, now making its way directly into ChromeOS.

New Chromium code has been found, suggesting NotebookLM will come pre-installed on ChromeOS. NotebookLM will come with new hardware by default, and apparently, it will soon be available in the app drawer on Chromebooks, as indicated by a code change to Chromium Gerrit.

Basically, NotebookLM is an AI tool that can be used to summarize and analyze documents, videos, and all sorts of content. You can upload documents to it, including PDFs, websites, videos, and audio. The tool is already available through its dedicated website, but it has not been heavily advertised by Google just yet.

Google will be pre-installing NotebookLM in its operating system. At the moment, it's not known whether an update for all ChromeOS users will bring it to older machines, or it will be reserved just for newer Chromebook models, including new Chromebooks from Acer expected this summer.

In fact, NotebookLM is a Google Gemini feature. As such, it's not exclusive to ChromeOS and can be used by any Chrome or Chromium user. It's been available since July 2023, but it's very likely this is the first time you're hearing about it, as it's not been advertised as much as other AI tools.

It's powered by Gemini and its advantage is that it is able to understand a large amount of information. It can also simplify complicated documentation. At first, NotebookLM was built as a research and note-taking assistant, but in the last 19 months, its capabilities have expanded.

On top of it all, NotebookLM also recently got Mind Maps, a feature available for both free and paid users. Mind Maps allow you to understand the big picture of a given problem visually and thus make sense of it faster.

NotebookLM also features Audio Overviews. This feature generates an AI podcast of two people talking about your document or whatever content you have uploaded to it, which is an excellent way to learn something and can actually be quite fun.