Have you ever heard of NotebookLM? If you haven't, NotebookLM is an AI tool from Google that turns written documents into realistic sounding podcasts.
Too good to be true? Not really! I tried it and was pleasantly surprised.
NotebookLM was web only since its release, but last month, Google quietly released a mobile app.
And people noticed!
According to Appfigures intelligence, NotebookLM crossed 1M downloads within 10 days of its release and at this point is already on 1.3M devices.
That's fairly similar to Meta's new AI app which got a lot more coverage than NotebookLM.
Downloads were pretty balanced between the App Store and Google Play, and the US was the biggest driver of downloads across both with Japan in second place on the App Store and India in second place on Google Play.
Unlike ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Claude, and other AI apps, NotebookLM sits in a category of its own. But Grok has been pushing its voice model more and Claude just got into that race as well so I expect to see more competition in this space.
Beyond competition, what I'm more interested in seeing is how this technology will be used in the wild. Google hasn't put an explicit policy (that I could find) on NotebookLM's output, but I see quite a few clever ways to use it to describe content in a knowledgebase, read technical articles, and more.
If that does catch on, it'll be Google's game to lose.
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