By Emily DeMotte*
As artificial intelligence continues to develop in the mainstream, newsrooms around the world are learning to adapt. In a demo-style workshop at the 26th International Symposium on Online Journalism on the afternoon of Friday, March 28, Google News Initiative trainer Iain Christie led conference participants through two AI tools designed to streamline the work of journalists, NotebookLM and Pinpoint.
Powered by Google’s Gemini AI, Notebook LM is a custom research assistant that can “summarize facts, explain complex ideas and generate connections,” Christie said. The tool only pulls information from the sources you provide, he said, which differentiates it from other AI tools.
With the tool, users can upload up to 50 sources for free to a collection, or notebook. Files can range from Google Docs, PDF files, audio files, web URLs and more, although the tool does not currently support spreadsheets or CSV files. The tool can then perform a variety of functions to comb through information.
“Notebook LM is really good at summarizing and synthesizing to make sense of your sources,” Christie said.
With the automatic summaries feature, the tool can provide an automatically generated summary of the content, which includes key topics and suggested questions to explore.
“It’s a very smart piece of functionality,” Christie said. “It’s basically that kind of introduction; it makes your sources much more manageable.”
Another key feature of NotebookLM is the audio overview feature, which turns the content from your sources into an engaging “deep dive” podcast-form discussion.
“With one click, you can generate podcasts,” Christie said. “Two AI hosts (will have) a lively discussion, based on what you feed it.”
During a live demo, Christie also demonstrated the ability of the tool to automatically generate questions that engage with the source material, as well as answer questions asked by the user. Further, the tool can produce a study guide based on the provided sources, complete with essay-format questions. A session attendee who works with students even used this tool to efficiently generate study content for her students, he said.
“The great thing (is) that something that could have taken (her) two to three hours to put together was generated in a couple of seconds,” Christie said.
The latter half of the session focused on a newer Google AI tool, Pinpoint. Pinpoint is a source-grounded AI tool for data analysis with the capacity to comb through large collections of data efficiently. The tool allows for an unlimited number of collections that can hold up to 200,000 files each, and supports a much wider variety of files than its NotebookLM counterpart, Christie said.
“If you really need to find a needle in a haystack, Pinpoint is the tool for you,” he said.
With a wide variety of AI-powered features, Christie said the tool can pull details such as specific words, dates and details out of large data sets, transcribe and search through audio and video files, transform similarly structured tables into sortable sheets and more.
“So you can take years of poverty records, for example, just provide a specific aspect then take that away,” he said.
While any work done in Pinpoint is made private by default, the tool also features an “explore” tab, which is “a collection of collections from other news organizations around the world who have been using Pinpoint and have shared their potential,” Christie said.
In addition to its search, filter and summarize features, the tool also integrates optical character recognition (OCR), meaning it can detect words that are handwritten or difficult to read within a document. In a live example, Christie demonstrated the precise power of this feature, prompting the tool to locate a handwritten word.
“This is handwritten with a pencil on hand and fairly flawed handwriting, and it finds that word,” he said.
While Pinpoint is still a relatively new addition to Google’s collection, Christie said the tool’s team is uploading new, different kinds of functionalities on a weekly basis.
“Give it a go and see what it can do,” he said.
Emily DeMotte is a sophomore journalism student at The University of Texas at Austin. Enjoys long-form and investigative reporting in both print and audio mediums, and is currently the associate projects editor for The Daily Texan and a producer for The Drag Audio.