Google is enhancing NotebookLM, its AI-driven note-taking and research assistant, with a powerful new feature designed to simplify deep, complex research tasks, along with expanded support for additional file types.
The platform is introducing “Deep Research,” a tool that automates and streamlines intensive online research. According to Google, it works like a dedicated research assistant—capable of producing detailed reports, identifying valuable articles, papers, and websites, and synthesizing insights from multiple sources.
Deep Research can take any question, build a structured research plan, and browse the web on your behalf. Within minutes, it generates a source-backed report that you can seamlessly add to your notebook. Meanwhile, you can continue collecting sources as the tool works in the background.
The vision behind Deep Research is to help users build rich, organized knowledge bases without disrupting their workflow.
To access the feature, start a search in the source panel and choose “Web” as your source. From there, you can pick your preferred research mode:
- Deep Research for comprehensive briefings and in-depth analysis
- Fast Research for quick, surface-level insights
Google is also expanding NotebookLM’s capabilities with support for more file formats. Users can now upload Google Sheets, Google Drive files via URL, PDFs from Drive, and Microsoft Word documents. This update enables new possibilities—such as generating summaries from spreadsheets or quickly importing multiple Drive files through simple URL pasting.
