NotebookLM: The most important new AI product
Very powerful way to organize information for yourself
A few months back, I strongly recommended checking out Google's NotebookLM. And now I’m back with a stronger recommendation because Google has made NotebookLM much more powerful and now some of it seems magical.
If you’re too lazy to read my previous article about NotebookLM, here’s a quick summary of what it is:
Google’s NotebookLM personalized AI research assistant that uses the power of the Gemini LLM to allow you to upload your own documents and then get expert research assistance in your own information. Instead of simply searching through your documents you should use NotebookLM, because it can digest and understand your notes, files, videos, audio recordings, entire books, and websites. Then it can provide summaries, examples, and answer your questions with citations (so you can that the answers are actually supported by the source material). This focused approach makes research significantly faster, especially for complex topics that might be spread out within your documents. While other AI tools like ChatGPT offer similar functionality, NotebookLM streamlines the process and directly links its answers to the source material, making it a superior choice.
What has changed in the last few weeks? Google has now added these capabilities to NotebookLM. You can:
Add YouTube videos to the source “documents”
Upload audio files and recordings to the source “documents”
Include the contents of a website by just specifying the URL
Auto-create a podcast based on the contents of the “documents” you’ve uploaded to a “Notebook”
You can create various “Notebooks”. Each notebook is a collection of your sources and notes on one topic. Then, whenever you need to write on that topic, or to get answers related to that topic, you just go to the notebook and ask it questions and it answers them really well.
The most impressive new feature is the ability to auto-generate a podcast from any notebook. For example, listen to this podcast I created by simply giving the URL of my company’s website (https://reliscore.com). It took less than 30 seconds of my time (and a few minutes of the computer’s time) to get this podcast ready. Here is another example based on the GenWise website.
You can do this with anything. It can be a collection of 50 different documents, an entire book, or multiple books, or YouTube videos, or an audio recording of phone call or a meeting, and any combination of these.
Further reading
Here’s a deep dive on NotebookLM’s features. And here’s article with lots of links to experiments with the auto-generated podcast feature.