How to Get the Most Out of Google NotebookLM

Google's versatile NotebookLM is more than just instant podcasts — here's how to use the AI-powered tool.

Google NotebookLM has become the AI tool of the moment since it added audio overviews. (Credit: Midjourney)

If you pay attention to what’s going on in AI, you’ve no doubt heard about Google NotebookLM. The Gemini-powered tool, released months ago, is a fairly straightforward AI project assistant: you feed it documents, transcripts, instructions and even YouTube videos, and then you can essentially “chat” with that information. But the tool got a huge boost in awareness when Google added audio overviews: essentially instant podcasts that give top-level takeaways about the data — complete with cheery, conversational hosts.

Like me, you may be excited to try NotebookLM and want to know how to get the most out of it. That’s exactly what Christopher Allbritton explores this week. And if you feed this article into the tool, let us know if you end up creating a singularity.

Also, for those who read my post on Google AI Overviews yesterday, a correction: In-line links in Overviews result in more click-through vs. the previous design, not traditional search, but the clicks are “higher quality,” per Google. — Pete

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How to Use Google NotebookLM for Smarter, Faster Journalism

As a journalist, I take a lot of notes. I mean, a lot. I record almost all of my interviews, collect dozens of PDFs and other texts, scour websites for data… you get the picture. 

If you’re an information packrat like me and have assignments requiring a lot of deep reporting, NotebookLM from Google will seem like a brand-new brain — one that can process all the information you’re gathering and leave the thinking to you.

What is NotebookLM? It’s a research- and information-organizing tool that uses Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro to parse and interpret all those transcripts and notes you’ve gathered in your reporting. Once uploaded, you can interact with your documents via a standard chatbot interface. So far, so ChatGPT. 

The welcome page for NotebookLM

NotebookLM differs from your typical chatbot experience because it only uses your notes and documents as information sources, whereas other LLM chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini pull from a vast body of training data online. If you’re AI-savvy, what it does is primarily a language task, not a knowledge task. And NotebookLM is scrupulous about sourcing where a bit of information came from. 

The result? A strikingly capable research assistant that can help you locate that exact quote somewhere in an interview, or source a specific bit of information to a document. It can even create an audio briefing that mimics two podcasters discussing your data. It’s pretty mind-blowing just how versatile it is. 

Let’s take a look at how it works, what you can do with it, and what are its limitations.