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Mahnoor Faisal is a tech-savvy professional who began her writing career at the end of her sophomore year of high school. Currently, she’s writing for MakeUseOf, XDA and SlashGear. Her passion for the iOS world ignited when she received her first iPod touch (4th generation) on her 8th birthday.

Since then, she has spent countless hours staying up to date with the latest features, developments, and trends in the ever-evolving realm of iPhone. Mahnoor enjoys writing about anything and everything technical, with a focus on iOS, macOS, and social media.

Currently pursuing a degree in computer science, her dedication to both academics and passion contributes to her ongoing development in the world of technology.

While NotebookLM was once somewhat of a niche tool, it’s now become a go-to option for anyone who works with large amounts of information. Whether that’s a student, a researcher, an educator, a startup founder, or even a parent overwhelmed with paperwork, it’s the kind of tool that quietly fits into a lot of different workflows. Interestingly, while many know NotebookLM for what it is today, few remember that it actually began as a Google Labs experiment.

For those unfamiliar with Google Labs, it’s the tech giant’s experimental playground where it plays around with innovative ideas that aren’t quite ready for prime time. While some Google Labs experiments end up getting shelved, NotebookLM is one of the few that made it out the other side. And if you’re someone who’s come to rely on NotebookLM, there’s another Google Labs experiment you’ll absolutely love: Illuminate.

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What is Google’s Illuminate?

Illuminate is currently an experimental tool Google is working on that "uses AI to adapt content to your learning preferences." While its goal of fostering learning is similar to NotebookLM’s, it achieves that in an interesting way — by focusing on NotebookLM’s flagship feature: Audio Overviews. Illuminate currently only ships with the ability to transform content into AI-generated audio discussions.

However, Illuminate isn’t designed to turn just any content you upload into podcasts, which is what NotebookLM does. Instead, its primary focus seems to be converting research papers into five-minute audio discussions. Despite being built around the idea of converting research papers into Audio Overviews, Illuminate, in hindsight, lets you convert any web content into audio discussions as long as it isn’t paywalled, from a site that has opted out of indexing, or contains content that violates Illuminate’s safety filters.

In addition to generating Audio Overviews from URLs, Illuminate also includes an Explore tab, which offers a selection of pre-built audio discussions based on research papers and books. While the books section includes a collection of mostly well-known titles like Moby Dick, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Research Papers section is currently focused on computer science topics.

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For instance, some of the options I found in this section include The Illusion of Artificial Intelligence, Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing With Diffusion Models, and Learning to Reason with LLMs. Given that Illuminate is currently an experimental project, users outside the United States will need to sign up on a waitlist to gain access to generate their own Audio Overviews. Otherwise, they can still explore the curated selections in the Explore tab.

Illuminate’s Audio Overviews are a step above NotebookLM

I’ve been using NotebookLM since its Google Labs days, and I played around with Audio Overviews when it was still a beta feature. The reason why I mentioned this is to illustrate that I’ve been following its development closely and have a good sense of how the feature has evolved over time.

Ever since I found Illuminate, I’ve been using it extensively as well, and I’ve noticed that it beats NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews in some key areas. For instance, when you’re generating an Audio Overview using Illuminate, you get to define the audio dialogue (essentially the style and tone of the discussion).

You can pick from: Casual, Formal, Guided, and Free Form. The first two options populate the prompt textbox with a pre-written prompt, while the Guided option includes a prompt with some fill-in-the-blank fields that let you provide key details like the audience, desired duration (quick, ie less than 5 minutes, medium, ie between 5 and 10 minutes, and longer meaning over 10 minutes), and the tone (professional, semi-professional, and casual).

The Free Form option gives you complete control to write your own prompt from scratch, allowing you to fully customize the discussion’s content, style, and focus according to your specific needs. Unlike NotebookLM, Illuminate also lets you pick the voices of your hosts *if *you pick the Freeform option.

While it auto-selects the hosts and guests voices for you when you go with any of the other options, one easy way to get around this limitation is to copy the prompt and paste it into the Free Form option, which then allows you to manually select the voices for both hosts and guests.

Once you’ve uploaded the links and selected all the customization options as per your needs, all you need to do is hit the Generate button. Once the overview is generated, you’ll immediately notice another area where the podcast is visibly better than NotebookLM’s: the transcript. Illuminate automatically generates a full transcript alongside the audio discussion.

This is something that NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews weirdly don’t offer, meaning you can’t easily read along or skim for specific points while listening. With Illuminate, having the transcript alongside the audio makes it much easier to review key information or quickly reference sections without replaying the entire discussion.

There’s also a handraise icon you can hit to type a question, and you get an answer that’s grounded in your sources (similar to NotebookLM’s approach).

Weirdly, there have been times where I ask questions about content I know is present within the sources, and Illuminate responds with: “Thanks for the question. I can only answer questions directly related to the content.” This limitation can be a bit frustrating, especially when the answer seems clearly supported by the material, but it’s understandable given that the tool is still in its experimental phase.

Finally, all your Audio Overviews generated using Illuminate are saved in a My Library tab for 30 days after creation, making it easy to revisit, replay, or reference previous discussions without having to regenerate them.

Illuminate is ideal for Audio Overview fans

While I’d recommend using NotebookLM if you find yourself relying on the tool’s other features more heavily, Illuminate is the better choice if your focus is on generating high-quality, customizable Audio Overviews with interactive transcripts.

The only limitation it currently has (which frankly is a big one) is that Illuminate only works with URLs. You can’t upload PDFs or any other file formats directly, which can be restrictive if much of your content exists offline or in non-web formats. Nonetheless, this is something the team seems to be working on!