No consumer AI product has truly delighted me in recent times as much as Google's NotebookLM. And consistently, with every feature they ship and minor tweaks and refinements to existing ones.
Firstly, it is a completely different product from popular chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude. There's little overlap between them and curiously, none of Google's AI peers have launched a direct competitor to NotebookLM, whose output is always grounded in the finite sources the user provides.
The NotebookLM product team also stands out from the rest of the Google products (barring AI Studio/Gemini of late) in that they are shipping almost every day. Sometimes, these are features that are still works in progress. But this rapid iteration strategy appears to be paying off. Here's why:
This (image below) is the new interactive mindmaps feature released yesterday and it's beautifully executed. However, at this point, one can't edit or customize this. So if there's typos or factual inaccuracies in your sources, you cannot manually correct them. This severely limits shareability.
But I can bet that these features are coming soon. If you remember, NotebookLM received mainstream recognition with its audio overviews feature in Sept 2024. However, it was not until months later that additional controls to guide the conversation were rolled out.
My takeaway is this - ship fast, ship often. Perfection can wait, but momentum shouldn't.