Google’s NotebookLM Aims to Be the Ultimate Writing Assistant
Steven Johnson has written 13 books, on topics ranging from a London cholera outbreak to the value of video games. He’s been a television presenter and a podcast host. He’s a keynote speaker who doesn’t have to call himself that in his LinkedIn profile. And for over a year now, he’s been a full-time employee of Google, a status that’s clear when he badges me into the search giant’s Chelsea offices in New York to show me what his team has been creating.
It’s called NotebookLM, and the easiest way to think of it is as an AI collaborator with access to all your materials that sits on your metaphorical shoulder to guide you through your project. NotebookLM was soft-launched to a select group earlier this year but is now available to all as an “experiment”—that’s Google’s low-risk way to see how the app behaves and how we behave with the app.
Johnson found his way to Google by way of a lifelong obsession with software as a “a dynamic thought partner,” a tool to speed up and enhance the creative process. When he was in college he became obsessed with HyperCard, Apple’s software that broke knowledge into chunks and allowed you to navigate an information-space through links. It anticipated web navigation before the web existed. “I fought mightily to turn HyperCard into that dream tool, but it wasn’t quite ready,” he says. He eventually became an enthusiast of Scrivener, a combination word processor and project organizer popular with book authors.
