Home › Forums › Cool Tools & Tips › Forays into AI › Dip into AI with Google’s NotebookLM

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    • Phil Rouble
      Keymaster
      June 16, 2025 at 7:06 am
      Post count: 32
      #4860

      Google’s NotebookLM is a free, simple and very cool AI tool that provides a safe “sandbox” to build confidence in working with AI. If you are looking for a place to jump into AI – START HERE!

      NotebookLM is an AI-powered tool for understanding. It is like your own note-taking and research assistant that helps you explore and understand a topic effortlessly and quickly. Powered by Google’s Gemini LLM, it summarizes your uploaded content, answers questions, and even creates mind maps and podcast-style audio overviews.

      Key Features:

      1. Easy to Use: A simple and intuitive interface uses 3 panes – Sources, Chat and Studio – which aligns with the inputs / process / outputs workflow of most LLMs
      2. AI Summaries & Answers: Upload PDFs, Google Docs, Slides, websites, and YouTube videos with transcripts. NotebookLM analyzes them and provides clear summaries and detailed answers with citations. Or ask NotebookLM to Discover Sources and have Google Gemini find its top 10 sources on a given topic. NotebookLM’s sandbox is limited only to the sources you upload.
      3. Personalized Notebooks: Create notebooks for projects or topics, upload up to 50 sources, and interact with your content through AI-powered Q&A.
      4. Audio Overviews: Convert your notes into engaging audio summaries for easy listening. These blow me away!
      5. Private and Safe: Your data is not shared externally and is not used to train the AI model.

      How to Use NotebookLM:

      1. Sign in with your Google account. (It’s free.)
      2. Create a new notebook.
      3. Upload your files or links.
      4. Ask questions in the Chat pane or request summaries in the Studio pane. Try the predefined buttons for ideas (e.g., mind map, study guide, FAQ, briefing document…). Save chats to notes if you want to keep them for future reference.
      5. Listen to audio overviews. Very cool!
      6. Explore!

      NotebookLM is where I first learned to make AI work for me. It is still my go to AI learning and exploring assistant.

       

      Forays into AI: I asked Perplexity AI to create a 200 word overview of Google’s NotebookLM which I used as the starting framework for this post.

    • cmcarthur
      Keymaster
      June 16, 2025 at 8:04 am
      Post count: 28
      #4861

      Hey Phil,

      Thanks for this great post!

      I also think the audio interview was very fascinating. I fed it a spreadsheet of information for my mom’s upcoming appointments, and it converted it into a conversation between 2 “people” talking about what is upcoming, when and where. It was such a unique way of consuming the information and much more interesting than viewing columns and rows of static data.

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