I Finally Gave Google’s NotebookLM a Shot; Here’s How to Use It

Sep. 13, 2024

First off, Google calls NotebookLM an “AI-powered research and writing assistant,” but it’s much more than that. You can upload various types of files, including PDFs, Google Docs, Google Slides, TXTs, and Markdown files. Plus, it allows you to input URLs to fetch the content directly from the internet or paste text into the source page.

You canadd up to 50 sourcesin a single notebook. By the way, none of your uploaded files are used for training Google’s Gemini AI.

NotebookLM, powered by Google’s flagshipGemini 1.5 Promodel, analyzes all your local documents and becomes an expert on the material you have provided. Basically, NotebookLM, in a way, lets you create a custom AI chatbot that generates relevant responses from your personal notes and documents.

For students and researchers, NotebookLM is an amazing AI tool as it lets you generate new insights and find information from multiple sources in no time.

What I love about NotebookLM is that it adds inline citations to quickly find the supporting passage in a document. In addition, since Gemini 1.5 Pro is a multimodal model, it can also analyze images, diagrams, and charts from your local sources, inferring meaning from both visual and textual data. I wish this feature came toGemini Gems, but for now, you can use NotebookLM.

Besides that, Google recentlyaddedan “Audio Overview” feature to NotebookLM whichcreates a podcast-style deep dive discussionon uploaded materials using AI-generated hosts. I found it exceptionally good and natural to understand key topics as if I were listening to a podcast on my personal notes.

How to Use Google’s NotebookLM

So, if you are interested in Google’s NotebookLM AI tool, here is how you can use it.

So, this is how you can take advantage of NotebookLM to gain new insights and find information from your personal documents and notes. The AI tool is completely free, which is the best part. In case you are looking for thebest AI tools for researchers, check out our linked guide. And if you’ve any questions, drop a comment below.

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