NotebookLM is in my mind an introductory product for deep understanding which does RAG and long podcasts well. However, strong understanding requires much more.

NotebookLM is in my mind an introductory product for deep understanding which does RAG and long podcasts well. However, strong understanding requires much more. We are still building out a coherent experience, but key ingredients are a strong exploration artifact (our map aims to be that), rich source control, context engineering (of the nature you pick up on above), and switching between modalities. We also have a powerful reader which lets us switch to various levels of summaries/original source on a chapter level, and jump between these easily. There's also friction in Notebooklm like you have to find web sources manually; our agent aims to do that from a simple text request. Going forward, we aim to add the ability to have a strong note taking experience (you can take hierarchical notes, AI assisted), and the agent should nudge you to complete what you are trying to achieve in a space. In the chat agent, there's an option to turn off AI knowledge; and we are adding chapter level context control. I think 'start until upto this point' (and 'from this point to end of text') are great additions. Will add. Regarding the generalization, I think with strong context engineering and powerful reasoning, this is hopefully achievable. But making a bespoke feature for this feels hard. Thanks for your feedback!