YouSaid · the spoken record

Raiza Martin

lines on the record: 52
first: 2024-10-10
most recent: 2024-10-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, please keep trying it. Try it. Share your feedback. Whether you find it useful, not useful, you think it's annoying? Tell me. These are the things that I've heard, you know, for the last year that's helped me to make it better. And so if you're inclined, please go ahead, try it. Notebook LM.google dot com.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, Discord, join our Discord, chime in. Yeah, we're there. You can ask me, or yeah, X also is pretty good. I just, I just came back to it and kind of feel like I don't really know how it works now. So just a warning in case you DM me, I might just not know how it works.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I say this in the most non creepy way possible. I say this because we are just very passionate about trying to build the right thing, the best thing for everybody. Kind of going back to sort of, hey, who are you building for? I think that there's a lot of fun use cases, but there's a lot of actually very useful sort of game-changing workflows in here. And so we'll continue to build in that direction, I think, particularly for educators, for learners, for professionals, right? Knowledge workers, as we call them. I think there's a lot there that we'll be able to execute against in the very short term.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there's one thing I could say is that we are continuing to learn from users every day. So please keep using it. Please keep sharing your feedback, whether it's on X or on Discord. Like I'm there every day. Even if I don't respond, I've read everything.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extent. And we just added to the test cases. I think if there was ever a scenario where we're like, oh, this feels pretty insane. If we would pull it back, but I think hopefully we've built it in such a way where we don't have to do it.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI realized they were alive or something. It's actually that David was in the show notes. They were supposed to act this out. And so I felt really much more confident that like, oh, people get it. That's exactly what this is. Somebody uploaded some notes and said, hey, this is the end of the show. So, you know, make sure that you act accordingly. And that for me was enough for me to be able to say like, okay, I'm going to address this publicly and say something on Twitter and make sure that people know that like, hey, I've seen it. And I get it. Like, this is like what people do with it. In terms of red teaming at Google, though, what I will say is we have, you know, this is one of the things that we care about the most. We have huge teams that work on red teaming it. We test for about as many areas as you can think of that we imagine we need to do in order to make it safe. And I think certainly I think we'll run into situations where, okay, we didn't think about that or like we haven't tested that to the fullest.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I basically just went with what I thought was the right thing to do, which is I think people are getting to experience this technology for the first time ever. And of course they're going to try to do things that are maybe something that we didn't think about. We didn't think they would do or we didn't think that they could do, right? With like the jailbreaks and stuff. But I think that's such a natural part of human curiosity. And I think like there was a moment where it's like, oh, do we like pull this back, right? Because this is like, oh, is this like a safe thing? But because the response, I think, was that people were like, oh, it's saying that because of the sources. Like, this is no, like,”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. It's such a good question. I think I heard that. It was over the weekend. I think it was on a Saturday or Sunday. And I remember hearing it and thinking, oh my goodness. You know, this is actually one of those moments where you feel like we're at a fork in the road. And I hadn't read any of the comments. I just heard the audio. I think I saw it on Reddit first and then I saw it blowing up on Twitter. And I remember thinking, what is the attitude of like the world now? How do we feel about this type of audio? It was really the first thing that I thought. And so I actually spent most of that morning reading the comments, reading on Twitter. And I was thinking about, you know, what is the right thing to do? Should we say something? Should we not say something?”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, although I will say to be very fair, I mean, Stephen and I also disagree on a lot of different things. We've clashed a bunch. And I think this is where I feel really grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him and to really grow with him in that way. And I used to make fun of him. And I was like, have you ever had a coworker before Stephen? Because I think you've been an author forever. And it's really funny because he's so, he's so down to earth and he's so humble that even with our disagreements, we always reach at the end, we're always aligned, right? Even if we don't agree about something, we're aligned on the next step. And that's really powerful, I think, particularly for product professionals, right? For PMs, where it's like, I don't want to disagree at the end and then not have an outcome on top.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Oh, I think Stephen is Aside from one of the smartest people you'll ever meet, he has written fourteen books. He's a New York Times bestselling author and speaker. He has a show on PBS. I can't remember what it's called bids out on YouTube is really incredible. And he is a he is a journalist. Actually, funny story about Stephen is when I was about to join labs. I really wanted to join Labs because I wanted to join Josh in whatever he was building. Josh told me, hey, you know, to give you an idea of what we're doing here, he sent me a couple of things to read. And one of them actually ended up being Stephen's article that he wrote, the one about how AI is mastering language, should we trust it, says the New York Times piece. And I remember reading it and being like, yes, this is the thing. I'm going to work on it. And so before Stephen had even joined, this was actually the piece that I was like, I want to go do that. I'm going to go do that in labs. And then he ended up joining.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it is just crazy to think that you could sort of invite someone like Stephen and become part of your team and have him sit with you every day and have him answer your questions about how he does things, right? But I'll say that the broader lesson there for me, it's like something we've tried to live by every day, is really how do you get users or people and really sit with them for meaningful periods of time. Because I think that has been so crucial for me, not even just for Stephen, but even with students, just follow students around, watch them do homework, watch them study, talk to them about how they feel when they study. I think just being able to do that at a really regular and sort of intentional capacity makes a huge difference in terms of like the product insights you'll come up with.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Powerful about doing that, right? Like thinking about this person who has like a super flow and trying to bring that to people. And so Stephen is also just like such a great partner with ideas. I always tell him ideas and I'm like, hey, crazy idea of the day. And he'll just banter with you and he'll be like, well, what about this? How can people do this? And so it feels really incredible to have him on the team.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I learned a lot just from watching Steven of his craft and thinking about okay, how do I make people really, really good at densifying information? Is that something we all do every day, right? In our own little ways, maybe not in like a Steven Johnson way. But from the get-go, I told him this. I was like, Steven, I think you're the product. I think it's you. And I'm going to follow you around. I'm going to watch everything that you do. And we're going to try to figure out how we use technology to build it. And he always laughs about this. And it's really funny because he does have some very interesting workflows that I'm like, I do not see any person ever doing anything like this. He always talks about his read-wise with like his 8,000 quotes or something. I'm like, that's extreme. That's crazy. And, you know, I have like post-its that like sometimes they're crumpled in my pocket. Like this is like the average normie flow. And when I learned from Seaman is like, hey, there's something.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the thing about Steven is he is the most curious, most respectful, and really just full of ideas, kind of person. And so when Stephen joined a lot of what was really interesting to me is I would watch how he worked, the way that he thought about language, the way that he thought about information, the way that he thinks about knowledge and sharing that with others. Because Steven's books are like really incredible. It's like part mystery, super science, right? It's just very cool. And I was watching the way that he works. And, you know, he does all of this research. And I thought maybe this is the nugget, right? Maybe I watch Steven and I look at the way that he does these things and I look at how much time it takes for him to do it. And then I make it my own metric to cry.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so funny. I'm so fond of Stephen and I tease him a lot that whenever people ping me and they want to have a meeting and I don't want to go to the meeting, I say, oh, I'm not the PM. It's Stephen Johnson. I want to talk to that guy. And he was like, so that's why all these people have been picking me. But, you know, kitting aside, Steven, Stephen John, I was like, well, this is super interesting. This has never happened to me before. There's this very accomplished distinguished person that I really respect love his books, love his writing. And now he's going to come work with me in a capacity where I was like, I'm just not sure what he's going to do here.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah It's true. I don't know if you've seen the chicken one, but it's pretty similar. Somebody uploaded. I think it's on threads. It's a PDF that looks a lot like a research paper, but it just says chicken. Well, document says chicken. I would give it a listen. There's a funny segment where they're like, get this. It's a paper or a research paper that has more chicken in it than KFC. God, God, good. So good.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I actually, when I saw that one, I was about to go to bed. And I was like, all right, if I listen to this now and this is a negative one. Going to have to get my laptop and work because I can't sleep, right? If I feel like there's something here that's like, we need to address right now. Then I was like, okay, I'm just going to do it. So I listened to it. And I think I listened to a lot of these and they always make me feel some kind of way. I laugh a little bit. There's one where it's like they make scary voices. That one was cool too. But this one, this one was one of the ones where I genuinely was just really delighted at the output because it was so delightful. I don't know if you listen to the whole thing, but there's a segment where one of the speakers says, hey, it's kind of like, you know, you lean into the bazaar or something. And they're describing walking past a shop that was full of rubber ducks wearing costumes. And they're like, oh yeah, it's, you know, it's silly, but you just want to lean into it. So I walked into the store and I was like, oh, it's a great analogy, actually.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was amazing. Actually, when I saw it, I was like, whoa, this by itself is like a great product. And I think the original potato podcast that we had created was actually, I think it was because of the Wikipedia article of the day was about potatoes. And so there is something there. It's like, hey, if you want to learn something new today, maybe you can just listen to it on your drive to work or something.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's like one of the common use cases. I think that's one of the ones where it's like. I think it's kind of interesting because it's like everybody wants to catch up on the latest on AI. We want to try to keep up to date on sort of the published papers. But most of the time, it's like reading the paper can take time. It's dense, complex. You have to break down the concept in it. And I think that is a highly sort of extensible use case. I would say the number one use case is actually a lot of students taking their study materials and wanting to turn it into an audio guide.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. And I think even for myself, it depends on my mood, right? If I'm going on a walk, yeah, I want audio. But if I'm at work, yeah, most of the time, text is good. And it's kind of interesting to think about today the formats are not as malleable. I have to accept it in the format, you know, that you give it to me. But if I had sort of that power myself to choose, hey, thanks for this 100-page doc. I'm going to go ahead and turn it into an audio overview, actually. It sort of shifts, I think, the dynamic between the person and the knowledge that's given to them. And there are actually many, many times that I've been given a 100-page doc and I just didn't read it. So I wonder, I mean, just frankly speaking, it's one of my funny stories is actually when I first joined Labs. Josh did give me a 50-page doc. She was like, here's, you know, what I think about this, this, this. It was like basically his vision. And instead of reading it, I just grilled him.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And I think it's funny because I was like, you know, the knobs seemed really apparent. And I was like, Is that what people”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that we're definitely experimenting with different formats. And when we demoed it at I.O., you could interrupt in. We're trying to be really thoughtful about, hey, what does that interrupt actually look like? What do people want when they do this? And, you know, I was thinking about the next set of improvements we're going to ship. And the first thing that I thought was let's ship a bunch of knobs. To me, it was like what I was hearing people wanted. They want knobs. They want sliders. They want text boxes. But then when I looked at the mocks, I was like, oh, that's great. Like this doesn't feel magical. It almost doesn't feel like the same thing that we've shipped so far. And so for me, I'm actually taking a little bit of time to think about how do we make even that thing and control experience much more magical and delightful.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Video. Out of these things, make chatbot. I think there's something interesting here where. For most of the things that I'm hearing, people say they want to do, it's usually that take something and make it into something new. And so we're going to pursue that, but even more tactically, something I'm really interested in is thinking about, hey, how do we bring this to mobile? The mobile app to me is such a big gap in terms of the experience today, which I think is understandable considering where we're at in the product development cycle. And I think that's the next horizon is, hey, how different is the mobile experience and how can we make it interesting?”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I have a really ugly slide. I wish I could show you. I made it two years ago, and it was lime green. I don't know what I was thinking. I think I was trying to go for ungoogly was the vibe. It's like, hey, you're going to do different things this time. And the reason why that slide is so important to me is because it has my vision. The thing that I wanted to do from the get-go, which was I imagine that in the future, you could have an AI editor surface, right? Fully remixable, any input, any output. And that to me is sort of like a really powerful sort of core nugget where if you imagine you could take anything, whether it's video, audio, your emails, your LinkedIn, your Twitter, right? The world of things that we care about, you have an AI interface that allows you to shape it and say, look, how do these things make me a blog post? Out of these things, make me a tutorial.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I joined, my mandate was to build a business. And I was like, all right, if we break down the steps here along the way, I have to build something interesting first. I feel like, okay, we hit the first thing. We built something interesting. Now we go figure out the business. And I think, you know, that comes naturally to Google in terms of thinking about distribution, how to monetize it, how to commercialize it. There's different pathways, whether it's cloud or workspace or even the consumer route. And so for me, I think these are the things that we want to be really thoughtful about because the machinery is already there. And for me personally, it's really about there's something super exciting here. We need to deepen that, right? Like while in parallel, we should be thinking about commercialization. Let's deepen this user experience that so many people have really sort of latched onto.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meeting with you because we found out that a bunch of people in our company are using this tool with our Gmails, with their Gmail account. They're not supposed to do that. So we just want to make it official that they can use this at work with their official working emails. I thought that was pretty cool. And then the third thing I'll say is the number of businesses that we've seen using Notebook LM just, it's astronomical. It's just like crazy. I think we went. I don't want to say the exact numbers, but it is now at a point where I have to hire business development person because I was like, hey, I have to ship products and I'm actually taking like customer calls every day now. Very, very exciting.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple of things, well, I'll tell you three things. I think the first is. I can't share the exact numbers, but for a product that's only been out for about a year, I think the rate at which our retention has gone up across, you know, across the typical measures, daily retention, weekly retention, monthly retention, that I think has been very, very positive for us in terms of like even when we talk to stakeholders, we say, hey, we've got something here. The second thing I'll say is even seeing how the demographics have changed. Where I think in the beginning, we saw educators, learners really loved the product and they were a lot of our demographic. It's really now a big mix of, I would say educators and learners are still a big part of it, but really professionals, right? Huge interest for professionals that are like, wow, I want to use this at work. And really funny, I won't mention the company, but I actually had a call with a company recently where they were like, hey, we thought we'd schedule them.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that somebody did ask me. They were like, why not a group of meet? Why not a Google group? Why not this? And I was like, I don't even know how to use these things, you know, outside. So I was like, the server, the server is the way to go. They would have no people come in and want to talk to us about the thing that we built. And so that was in the early days. Very exciting to look back and remember day zero and now have 60,000 people in it.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True. That's true. And I think, you know, one big thing, too, is we got to try new things Even from the beginning, I was like, hey, I want to have a Discord, right? Like we were building outside of Google, for sure. We would have one of these. And in true sort of Google fashion, everybody was like, what is a Discord? Okay. You know, great, do it. But what is that”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was really jazzed about that. And I remember talking with Josh about this in the early days of like, hey, if we really want to do zero to one, we have to do things very differently. And so as a result, I think that's why Notebook LM is able to operate differently. It's because in labs we have the environment to do it. We have the environment to move fast. We have far, far, far fewer processes, maybe even to a fault. Sometimes we'll go to meetings that are literally the product managers, the engineers, the designers all together. And we'll just crank on the mocks and the PRDs at the same time. And NG is basically already doing implementation as we're meeting. And at Google, it's just not how things are traditionally done, right? Especially, you know, coming from the previous organizations that I was at, like, it just takes a lot of time to do each of these things.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here for. And he said, it's AI. We're going to ship AI products and we're going to build businesses out of them. Okay, sounds good. Sounds good. It's like, now I have to study. I have to do a lot of studying because I came from payments, came from ads before that. And so for me, it was a little bit of a mental shift. But before that, I actually worked only at startups. And so I felt like, hey, maybe this is my chance to do zero to one again.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's such a good question. I think, you know, there's a question of how it came to be, how we're able to operate in this way. And then the question of, hey, is this how other Google teams want to operate? And I think that to answer the first part, I'll say that it's interesting because Google Labs is only about three years old. It's fairly new. And when I joined, there was nobody here. There's no one. And the reason why I joined was because my old boss went and actually started it. And so this is Josh Woodward, who's the VP of Google Labs. And it's really funny because I was like, it's just like a funny anecdote. I remember I had no idea what Google Labs was, but I like my old boss so much that I was like, I'll just work on whatever he's working on. Whatever his new idea is, I'll just do it. And I remember when I joined, I was like, what's the mission?”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I thought that was so interesting. I was like, what was the use case? I think if I had to guess, somebody probably was like, hey, I want to try this new thing, clicked on upload Google Doc, and maybe, you know, the last thing you had there was like your resume or something. But imagine you click that. And I think there's something really special about you don't know what's going to happen. You just click generate and then you have this two people just hyping you up.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The amount of Googlers that ping me that I don't even know, and they're like, wow, this was such a boost to my confidence just to upload my own check-in notes and then have it generate an audio overview. It's like people are going into meetings, feeling really good about themselves.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean, I love the resume ones. I think the resume ones are so delightful and actually really adjacent to that is Google has these Q3 check-ins or like quarterly check-ins where we have to write performance reviews for ourselves. And the amount Googlers. Yeah.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually took my dad's bio, so he worked at a hospital. And he has a bio for the doctors that they have there. And I put his bio and I generated an audio overview for him. And it's so funny because my parents are both in the medical field. I don't think they fully know what I do. I think this is the first time they were like, oh, that's super interesting. That's what you do.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the funniest thing was that so my husband doesn't know, right? He doesn't know what I'm doing. Most of the time, I try not to talk about work at home. And so I would listen to these audio overviews over and over at home. And I get tired of wearing my headphones, so I'm just listening to them out loud. And he's like, what is this thing you are listening to? This is like an ever-running podcast about nothing. It was just super funny. I had to be like, oh, it's just something I have to do for work. So it was pretty funny. He actually couldn't tell that they were AI.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's the model. That's the audio model that we use. Alongside the content studio is designed to bring out the best of that model. And I think when we listen to a lot of like the early attempts that we had, it wasn't nearly this good. And so we had to do a lot of listening to try to figure out how do we actually get the model to behave in this way. And that's where I think the magic happens.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't share too much about how content studio works, but you can imagine it's the same thing that powers all of Notebook at Limb, which is there's different ways that you could interact with your data, right? You could like Q&A inside of Notebook LM. But then there are places where you just one push a button and create something new. So content.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talented engineer on our team. His name's Usama, and he's the real craftsman behind thinking through content studio and thinking about what makes something really relatable to people in a way that's engaging, that's interesting. So Content Studio is the real magic here.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that's such a great question. I mean, truly the Gemini models are so powerful. And we use Gemini 1.5 Pro as sort of the base for Notebook LM. And then we have a powerful voice model on top of it, an audio model on top of it. But I think the real secret sauce to what makes this really good is something we've built, which is a content studio. And you kind of see a clue of this inside Notebook LM, where when you open up Notebook Guide, NotebookGuide is designed to take an opinionated approach to the content that you've given it. And what it's really trying to do is be as helpful as possible. It gives you a summary, gives you buttons where if you click on it, it'll write something for you. And the audio is a big part of that. And so this was very interesting for us because we had to think about what shape should that audio be in, right? Like the deep dive is the first format we've thought about. And we actually have”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that totally strikes at the heart of what we're trying to do as well, which is, you know, a lot of technology, I feel like you have to shape it and bring it closer to people. And I think it's like such an interesting thing to iterate on to be like, what is the shape? Right. Like soon you'll get there. Like if you keep going at it, you'll eventually, I think, land on something that like when people look at it, they're like, wow, I get it. And that's always like what we're hunting for. But I think to your point, technology has been there, right? Like, I mean, it feels so crazy to say that because even with like the advent of like the chatbots, right, of LLMs as we know them today, and then to introduce this sort of new technology on top of it, we've only been doing this for like two years, but already, right? We're exploring so many different ways to use it.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, use a lot of voice input. And voice output, I noticed when I was experimenting with it early on, it changed a lot of things for me. It's like, oh, it changes the way that I interact with the technology. It changes the way I feel about the technology. It sort of affects the way that I'm even thinking in real time throughout this process. And so we thought about what is a good way to introduce this to people where they could sort of easily get the value of it and have a little bit of fun. So I think, you know, for me is like fun is like such a big part of it too, which is like, how do we make this cool? And so hopefully we've done that here.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is really funny. I talk about this quite a lot, especially when I'm talking to other PMs. I feel like the way that I've always built products is I start from a problem and I think about the solutions to solve it, solve it for people in a meaningful way. And in labs in particular, we start with the technology. And it's actually a very interesting place to start where you're like, okay, what are the practical applications to this? How do I go about finding the answer? And I think we've seen different approaches to this, right? Where you just put the tool out there, you study how people are using it. And I think that's like a fine approach, but we tried to have a little bit more of a hypothesis about what is the shape of this thing. To actually get the most learning out of it. So for the audio feature in particular, the nugget there was really we had this ability for you to interact with text, but people were like, the output is still always text, right? And I'm actually a big fan of voice modality in general.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, what you see today give it a little bit of information. You don't have to do a lot. You can just enter a URL, upload, you know, your resume, and then it will completely generate something for you that could be unexpected, could be a surprise.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We announced, we actually did a preview of this in I.O. this year, so in May. And the way that it worked out is notebook had already been launched. We had a bunch of people using it. It was this source grounded chat interface. And we were looking at basically what are the new models coming out of Google. We had Gemini, 1.85 coming out. We had all of these new technologies that are basically upgrades on fundamentally the same thing. And we were like, what are some interesting ways that we could power Notebook LM or make it even better? And one of the things that we started playing around with was actually a different team inside of Google, inside of labs specifically. They were like, hey, we've got these like really powerful audio models. What's a really good application of this? And that's when we started riffing and we were like, hey, what if you could?”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've had a lot more folks join in the last month, and a lot of that is really in anticipation of the future roadmap. But up until this point, I'd say we didn't even have 10 engineers. When we launched it, actually, when we announced Project Tailwind, I think we only had three. We had three engineers. It was myself. We had a designer. We had Steven. And that was it. And so even between the period when it was. To as recently as like last month. You know, we've only had about eight engineers or something.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineer, and eventually Stephen Johnson joined. And it was really funny because the only person who was actually like really full time on this was the engineer working on the technology. And everybody else was kind of just like coming together, like really chiming in, being like, hey, this is super interesting. How do we make this better? So it really really started as a 20%. And then it kind of just blew up from there.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Actually, notebook started as a 20% project, as things kind of do at Google, as they used to. And it's funny because I wouldn't even call it a 20% because it was way more than that. So I'll start from my perspective where I was leading AI Test Kitchen, which was one of the first AI things we launched at Google. And this is, I think maybe two IOs ago or maybe three now, actually. I think it was in 22. And I was leading that project. And I remember there was a smaller project inside of Labs called Talk to Small Corpus. And it was the idea that, you know, you could take a piece of content and use an LLM to interact with it. We were like, okay, there's a nugget there. It sounds interesting. How do we keep revving on this, right? To make it actually really useful. And it was just myself.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny because I've listened to so many of these and they do have catchphrases, they stay at the end, they say at the end. And stay curious is one of my favorite ones.”
2024-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Behind the product: NotebookLM | Raiza Martin (Senior Product Manager, AI @ Google Labs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source