Transcription
So I used to use ChatGPT a lot for work, but I pretty much never use it now. There's a new tool that I started using. It's free to use, and it's become one of my favorite, and honestly, one of the most powerful tools on the internet. It's called NotebookLM. It's from Google, and check this out. Last week, for example, I wanted to learn about an investment. I had four PDFs totaling over a 100 pages. I just uploaded these four PDFs to NotebookLM, and it generated an AI podcast that I listened to on my commute. And I'm not the only one who uses this. Spotify used NotebookLM to power Spotify Wrapped this year, which had a ton of AI in it.
So, in this video, I want to show you what NotebookLM is, why I like it, and 13 things you should be doing with NotebookLM to go from beginner to power user and level up your business, your education, your investments, or honestly, just your life in general.
So, to start off, I'm going to show this all in real time. On here, we can go to notebooklm.google.com. I can put a link in the description as well. But when you first land here, you just click on a little popup, and then you want to make sure you're signed into your Google account. That's how it saves everything in the notebook. Here, and we can create our first notebook. So, just clicking on that, it'll tell you to upload some sources. And that brings me to number 13 on this list of 13 different things you should be doing with this, and that is uploading multiple sources. We already know on ChatGPT or Gemini, for example, you can upload a source and ask some questions about it, and that's very useful. But NotebookLM specifically is designed to interpret a lot of sources, and it can handle a lot of different kinds of sources as well: PDFs, website links, videos, copied text, Google Docs, slideshows, even like markdown documents. A lot of different files can be interpreted here. So, if I have like a full audiobook and it's an MP3 file, I can upload that. It'll interpret the entire thing, transcribe it all, and then it'll have answers for me that we'll use later in this video. So, you can see we have a bunch right there, up to 50 different sources.
I'm going to choose a file right now. So, I just selected three PDFs that are about investing in timberland, for example. You can upload them, and then what we're able to do, as you can see on the bottom, very simply, like we see on a lot of other LLMs like this, you're able to ask questions. So, I could just say, like, "What are some risks of investing in timberland?" Hit enter, and it's going to answer that question.
And that brings me into number 12, which is you can ask very specific questions in the text field about the information that you uploaded, and it references different files, the source files here, which is way better than Ctrl+F. So, if you have a job where you're doing Ctrl+F and you're always looking for something in a large document, this may be a great alternative where you can simply upload the files here. And if you don't have the exact wording that you would need for Ctrl+F, instead, you could search for it here. It'll find it. You can see the sources like Source number three, Source number two. And if I click on that, it'll show me where in the source it actually got that information. And so, again, if you want to find exactly like one specific code from a township or, you know, anything like that from maybe a quarterly earnings report, you can do all of that right here.
Moving on to number 11, you can actually make a podcast to learn from up to 50 different sources. That's kind of what I showed in the beginning of this video, and there's really a lot of endless options. We'll talk more about how to customize this, but one example I like, as I kind of mentioned earlier, is for earnings reports. So, we'll do it with this example right here with timber. But earnings reports is a great example where you don't want to listen necessarily to the entire earnings report, but maybe you want to get like a summary of how your favorite company's doing. You can upload the earnings report, either the transcript or just the entire report as a PDF here. And then on the bottom, if you click on Notebook Guide, let me make sure you can actually see that here. So, just click on Notebook Guide. And here you can see "Generate a podcast." So, we're going to get into some more interesting ideas on how to do this. Just to start, you can click on "Generate." And for something small like this, like just three PDFs that they're not small PDFs, but they're all on a pretty similar topic, usually it's about a 10 to 12-minute podcast. Shorter subjects might be like three or four-minute podcasts. And if you add a lot of information, you can get a significantly longer podcast on here. Or what I like to do is make multiple podcasts. You can ask different questions, which brings me into number 10.
So, while it's generating, number 10 is to customize the podcast to focus on one topic or one question as a common thread for that podcast. All right, well, um, I was wrong about this one. I thought it'd be about 10 minutes. This one's 13 minutes, which is pretty great. We can just play a sample right now, and you'll see kind of the setup. It's a bit like, um, just two voices. They sound pretty natural, and the AI does a good job of making it like genuinely sound like people talking. Like there's a lot of pauses sometimes, much like any other podcaster. There is kind of some filler talk in there, so it's not perfect. But if you're driving, it's a great way to summarize, you know, contents from a huge library of content that you're trying to digest that would normally be readable or just take you a lot of time. So, I like to do this for my commute, typically, just a cool way to learn. But let's give it a listen and see what this one sounds like.
"All right, let's take a look at this research you sent about timberland and farmland investments. It looks like you're trying to decide if these alternative asset classes are right for your portfolio."
Okay, so first 10 seconds sounds like a podcast. Let's jump a little bit later into it, maybe like 8:30. We'll go to like 8:30 and see what that sounds like.
"Key difference is the income potential. Okay, farmland can generate more consistent income than timberland. Mhm, through things like lease payments."
All right, so he's comparing it to farmland, things that I would genuinely be interested to know about. It's just going to pick up more information and hopefully take time that you'd otherwise just be wasting while you're driving, listening to music, and you could, you know, choose exactly what you want to learn. If we click on the dropdown here, we can also change the playback speed. You can download it. So, if you wanted to have a bunch and string them together, or maybe you wanted to, you know, upload them to YouTube or Spotify or whatever, obviously look into like the terms for whatever platform you're doing, if it's allowing AI-generated content, but it's something that I think is really quite interesting you could do here.
But moving on to number nine, you're able to actually customize the podcast that you are creating. So, I'm going to close out of this. I want to make a new note. Let's just do a totally new one. I don't want to lose this podcast, it's pretty good. If we just click on NotebookLM at the top, you'll see we have our first notebook right there. We can say "Create New" and make an entirely new notebook with new sources. Maybe this time I want to learn a little bit more about, say, how to build a tiny home. So, I have four sources that are downloaded. I'm just going to add one at a time. And you'll also notice that every source that you upload, if you just click on the source on the left, it'll show you the entire source. And on the right side, in the Notebook Guide, it gives you a summary of what the sources are. So, if you have a lot of different notebooks and you don't recognize the file name for them, of course, you can open them, you can see a summary of each source. So, this will tell me a summary of that right there, key topics in there, you know. And we can also see a summary of all the sources combined over here, just to kind of keep your notebooks more organized. Kind of also helps you to summarize it in case you want to get a quick glimpse of what actually what something actually is.
So, let's say we want to make a podcast for this one right here, "How to Make a Tiny Home," but we don't want it to just be a generic summary of all the content we uploaded. Instead, you can click on "Customize," and we can add a lot of details here to really target a specific audience, maybe. So, you could say, you know, "Make a podcast as if I were, you know, an expert in the field," or "Make a podcast as if I were, you know, a child." And it's really, you know, a very high-level summary of the content. So, they give you a couple of examples of what you could do here. All right, so I have that. I'm going to say "Generate," and this is going to generate a podcast for that as well. So, once it's generated, we'll play back a sample of that.
Moving on to number eight, you can actually use NotebookLM to analyze presentations or calls that you were involved in. So, this would be a great business move. If you have, maybe you presented something, you have, you know, this slideshow, you have your audio recording, you can upload that and tell NotebookLM to analyze the language patterns, the consistency, and overall messaging to kind of help you analyze yourself. Give it, you know, it could pick up on some patterns, maybe, and, uh, hopefully find some hidden trends for you. So, for example, if you have like 25 successful videos or calls and maybe 25 that failed, you could upload all 50 of them and ask to see if there's any kind of trends in there and hopefully help improve your sales success ratio in the future.
Number seven, you can have NotebookLM create a study guide to increase your memory retention. This is very easy to do with a single button on the left side. So, if I just click on "Create Study Guide," the way NotebookLM is set up is within each notebook, you have notes. It's not my favorite UX right here, but you'll see we have this is going to show up as a note. We can add other notes, and these all kind of show up in an array, a grid right here that you can click into each of them and kind of manage them like that. But it's going to create a study guide right here. Now, it's not going to, it's going to take a second to do this because it is also generating that podcast at the same time. You can see the new note, it shows us right here, essentially the study guide. So, what are all the questions? We can go through them and try to answer them. So, if you're studying for an exam, maybe, and you have like, you know, your textbook, you can have it make a study guide based on a certain chapter, or you could do the same thing with, you know, a lecture or any anything that you have that you're going to upload as a source. Down here, we have the answers then. So, that I think is kind of a useful way to study. If you don't want it, you could always just delete that. But we have quite a few other things we can do as far as notes go as well. We can add a blank note and just kind of add whatever you want, typical note creation right there. I'm going to close that. And we could also convert all the notes to a source. I don't really use that particularly often.
Number six, though, we can have NotebookLM create a timeline, which is very interesting if you have like a lot of events going on, a huge project, or if you're just, you know, learning a lot about history and you have, you know, some autobiography of J.P. Morgan and you want a timeline of everything that was talked about in the book. The way we do that is again going down to Notebook Guide and simply just click on "Timeline." Now, that doesn't really make a lot of sense on this, um, but I'm going to click on it and see what it's able to come up with. Maybe it's going to show me like how long it takes to do different parts of a project, or I'm not sure exactly what it'll come up with. But if it was a historical document, that would make a lot more sense to show you the actual dates for certain things.
Okay, wow, this actually did come up with a timeline about tiny homes and how large homes were in different years and when they were used and stuff like that. So, that's that's very fascinating. That's not what I expected at all.
Number five, you can create a briefing doc. So, again, going back to Notebook Guide right here, "Briefing Doc" is another example. So, this would be great if you're onboarding new employees and you have, you want to create a document about how to do something. Maybe you have a training video already, maybe you have, you know, just a lot of resources on the topic. You can go and create a briefing doc to get them up to speed on how to do something. Or similarly, if you are trying to just summarize an entire project and present it to a manager, maybe you can upload all of your files here and create a briefing doc based on that. This could really be useful in many different situations. Leave a comment if you have any other ideas, honestly, for any of these, of where you would apply them. But just kind of something that I think in many businesses would be quite useful.
Number four, you can add multiple notes to your notebook. I kind of showed that a little bit earlier, right here. So, let's click on Notebook Guide and hide that. We have a lot of notes in this notebook, and all of them are going to be showing up right here. If we create new ones, of course, they are going to show up here, and you can rename them and change a lot about them. Um, but the other ones that personally I use are just saved responses. So, Notebook Guide and really these right here are going to be the primary ones I use, or anytime you have responses and conversations down here, those are going to be something that I would also save in notes if you find that it's something you want to come back to.
Number three, speaking of different notes, you can select multiple notes. So, if I select two of them right here, I can combine them to make study guides, to create outlines, to just create a combined note as well, or suggest related ideas, or even summarize them as well. So, again, you're just going more and more layers deep on the same information, something that just is a little bit different than you're able to do on Gemini or ChatGPT, where you kind of start going, you know, too many prompts down and it kind of loses track of the whole process you're doing. But this is a really interesting way to organize all your thoughts and all the ideas that in the and the answers into a very visual display.
Number two, then, you can use NotebookLM to analyze complex code. This is great for, you know, summarizing projects or adding notes into your code projects.
Hey guys, this video is ready to go live, but Google launched an update already. Like, this is a really fast-changing software. So, I wanted to show you two new things. First change is the layout. So, you can see we no longer have a little bubble on the bottom. The podcast is over on the right side now. So, you can see if you click on this little panel up on the top right there, that's where you access that. And the second thing is that you can actually interact with the podcast now. Uh, it's a feature that's rolling out from Google right now. I can't demonstrate it yet, I don't have access to it. But from Google's own demo, you basically just like raise your hand or call in, kind of like on a radio show, you can think of it like that. Uh, and you're able to, uh, just ask questions and kind of change the direction of the podcast a little bit, uh, using your own voice.
And then number one, you can use the AI podcast to help you make a decision, maybe to help you like feel better about your mental health or whatever it might be. Like, I, I've seen people use this to upload like their journal entries and then, you know, ask it to kind of make a podcast, and then you're just listening to people kind of talking about what you're already thinking about, but maybe in a different light, maybe just kind of making you think about it a little differently, and hopefully helping you to sort things out.
So, ultimately, this is a tool. This is not going to be something that, like, comes up with new information or really makes decisions for you. But the idea is to kind of shuffle information around, present it to you differently, help you learn more quickly, and, uh, hopefully help you make better decisions to really amplify things. Or, like I said before, if you just want to use this to make podcasts and publish that as content, you could totally do that as well.
A couple cautions to be aware of. Google does like to discontinue things. So, I recommend using this tool, but proceed with caution. Like, you don't want to save all of your information in here. It might be a good idea to download a lot of content and save it to another drive, just in case Google decides that, hey, this is a great tool, but they're going to, like, discontinue it in a couple of years. You never know. Google does do that quite a bit. Other things to note, that this is really being used in a lot of different platforms. As I said already, Spotify used this for Spotify Wrapped this year, and I suspect it will be bundled into many other integrations into the future.
But let me know how you think you'll be using NotebookLM. If you enjoyed the video, consider liking and subscribing. I'm Michael Brian with Santal Media, and I'll see you in the next video.