Google's ChatGPT? NotebookLM Mania has Set In

Hey Everyone,

Google thinks it’s hard to go from information to insight and that NotebookLM can help us with that.

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(?—??For a limited time get a Yearly sub for just $5 a month?— ?).

While Generative AI is not going to produce a personalized tutor or teacher anytime soon, it’s fun to imagine what it could become. The Google product that is now called NotebookLM was actually first launched in 2023 as Project Tailwind, and has since been rebranded and expanded and yet still somehow manages to feel like an experimental tool in a kind of purgatory realm of a preview.

Simon Willison calls NotebookLM ‘effectively an end-user customizable RAG product.’ I can see what he is getting at. It’s a bit like a B2C demo of the sorts of products that will soon become possible. What does this lead to? I think all of us can feel the potential of such products or appreciate how multimodal text-to-speech like this feels.

But is NotebookLM as a consumer phenomenon or reaction, its ChatGPT moment for Google DeepMind?

What surprised me is how much it was trending recently on places like Twitter/X recently, where NotebookLM and mostly the Audio Overview feature was getting a lot of seemingly organic shares in places moreover like TikTok in many different languages and places in the world this past week. I was listening to share after share about how wild or impressive this is.

NotebookLM is Quite Powerful says Andrej Karpathy

Keep in mind it is still in its experimental phase. I don’t know if it enhances note-taking as much as it just has a novel take on summarization and synthetic content. What would a multi-modal RAG B2C product actually look like right?

One of the key product people for NotebookLM is Raiza Martin. On a serious note it’s not exactly clear what NotebookLM could be used for in alternative use cases. The best thing about NotebookLM at this stage in its development is its interface.

Google ?? Nails the NotebookLM’s Interface

While the performance leaves a lot to be desired, I do very much like the interface. Upon booting up a new Notebook you see your sources that you have uploaded on the left and presented with a very functional intuitive interface:

Experts and Authors are Involved

The editorial director of NotebookLM is Steven Johnson. You can ironically listen to his insights an actual podcast here.

Read the About Page of his Newsletter.

Steven Johnson has his own Newsletter too, in fact he’s a famous author (14 books). The Verge quoted him on how he joined the project saying: “They reached out,” Johnson says when I ask how he got involved with Google, “and said, ‘hey, you’ve been dreaming of this ideal software tool that helps you organize your thoughts and helps you write and helps you formulate connections and brainstorm. We think we can do it now.” Johnson signed up, and has been at Google since the summer of 2022.

A Very Experimental Preview of NotebookLM (Notebook Language Models)

He made some odd tactical claims recently about NotebookLM on how to remember everything (like Quotes) you’ve read. We also know that more controls are coming to the generated podcasts. But let’s face it, they aren’t really podcasts, the Audio Overviews are just synthetic generalizations of fairly dubious quality. Let’s not pretend otherwise!

Still, you might over time find use cases in your studies, work or in your own research and content management to use the product. I actually find the quick text summaries NotebookLM can generative from a website, blog or YouTube come to be fairly good. Billed as a note-taking research assistant, Google Labs is trying to be useful. It certainly improves the functionality of Google Suite and Google Workspace as a whole. NotebookLM adds a bit of synthetic multimodal bling at least in terms of summarization.

At Least Google Labs is Trying ??

They call it a Research Tool for understanding things.

What can you do with NotebookLM?

I’ve been thinking more about this trending AI tool, and it’s practical applications.

Try NotebookLM

Read our Guide.

How Good are Audio Overviews and is it really “Wild”?

1. Create Audio Overviews (podcasts) from YouTubes (this is actually potentially useful, although many sources are blocked)
2. Create Audio Overviews (podcasts) from documents, blogs or websites
3. Note Taking & Homework Synthesis: Document Upload and Analysis: Users can upload various types of documents, including PDFs, Google Docs, and websites. NotebookLM analyzes these documents to become an expert on the content, allowing it to provide tailored responses and insights based on the uploaded material.
4. Research Summarization: One of the primary functions of NotebookLM is to summarize complex documents quickly. This feature is particularly useful for students and professionals who need to digest large amounts of information efficiently.
5. Study Resource Creation: The tool can generate various educational resources such as study guides, FAQs, timelines, and briefing documents based on the uploaded content.
6. Shareable Projects: Notebooks created in NotebookLM can be shared with others, allowing for collaborative lesson planning or project work. Users can give others viewer or editor access to their notebooks. It’s not really collaborative yet though per se, but I see the potential.

Case Study - Creating an Audio Overview from a YouTube

I took a YouTube by MIT titled: MIT Professor on How AI & LLMs are Shaping Financial Advice, Analysis, & Risk Management: Part 1

Some Tools and Topics we have Covered:

• Read our guide to Perplexity
• Read our guide to Google’s NotebookLM and Audio Overviews.
• Read some of our AI Tool rundowns here, here and here, along with Prompt Engineering here.
• Read our list of who to follow in AI.
• Read our list of AI apps to try and what comes next.

You can just try to create an Audio Overview for yourself and see what you think.

Try Google NotebookLM

• You can learn more about Google Labs here. Thanks for reading!

Read the entire piece here.