- The NotebookLM apps for Android and iOS are now official
- Many of the features of the web app are carried across
- If you pay for Google One AI Premium, you get more features
Google had already told us that mobile versions of the AI-powered NotebookLM research tool were on the way, and now they’ve appeared in the app stores for Android and iOS – just in time for the big Google I/O 2025 show later today.
As per Google’s latest blog post, the apps enable you to “understand anything, anywhere”, with “many of the core features of NotebookLM” carried over from the web version of the tool that’s been around since 2023.
If you’re completely new to NotebookLM, the idea is you feed it a bunch of sources – YouTube videos, web links, essays, PDF documents – and it can then collate all this information, summarize it, and answer questions about it.
NotebookLM’s most viral moments to date have been thanks to its Audio Overviews feature, which let you turn your sources into an AI-hosted podcast that sounds almost like the real thing. You can even interrupt the podcast with follow-up questions.
Yes please, Google
Having used NotebookLM for several months on the web, there’s no doubt I’ll be getting it installed on my mobile devices right away: it’s one of the most genuinely useful AI tools I’ve come across so far, and because you supply the sources, those pesky AI hallucinations are kept down to a minimum.
That’s not to say it can’t make mistakes, but I’ve not seen any obvious ones so far – and anecdotally, it seems more reliable than standard generative AI chatbots. Every question is answered with a detailed citation list, so you can see where information has come from.
For getting a brief overview of a huge topic, or explaining complex subjects in simple terms, it works really well. Recently I’ve been using it to dig into a couple of dense scientific studies, and make them more understandable.
The NotebookLM apps for Android and iOS are available now, free of charge. If you pay $19.99 / £18.99 / AU$32 a month for Google One AI Premium, you get NotebookLM Plus – that means you can generate more Audio Overviews, customize the style and tone of notebooks, and share your notebooks with other people.
Leave a comment