NotebookLM

What is it?

If you're not familiar with NotebookLM, it's an AI notebook. It has some basic knowledge but most of the AI is logic. It doesn't access the entire public internet like Gemini or all of X like Grok. This means NotebookLM is an infant…, but one that you can train and control its knowledge base.

What can you feed it?

Web page, PDF, YouTube link, plain text, Google Drive document. For a web page, this can mean most articles on the web. When you can't, an alternative is to turn the web page into a PDF. A PDF good practice in any case. It provides a snapshot that you can backup and import into feature notebooks. A YouTube link is a powerful option because it takes the entire transcript as a resource. However, the most powerful resource is a Google Drive document. NotebookLM is a Google product and is well integrated with the Google Workspace. The benefit of using something like a Google Doc in a notebook is that you can click a button to trigger the resync process. For other resources, you can either live with multiple versions or go through the manual process of replacing a resource.

What does it do with it?

Off the bat, it can give you an AI summary of all the resources in your notebook. I typically make a temporary single resource notebook for articles and YouTube videos that I want to query direct questions on. If you need a way to clear your reading list or YouTube queue, this is it. You can get a summary and move on. It can condense 500,000 words down to a paragraph. If you want to read the original source after that, you can do so; NotebookLM provides a direct link back to the original source. If you have multiple resources, you can also have it cross-reference data and generate reports. It does well at understanding relationships and you can also use natural language to explain relationships that you think might be hard to intuit. There's also the option to turn the notebook into a podcast if you would rather listen instead of read.

Limitations

Each resource can contain 500,000 words. You can have 50 notebooks on the free tier, and 300 notebooks if you're subscribed to Gemini Advanced.

Ghost

AI chat clients are pretty good at giving you direct answers. However, it pulls from the larger internet, many thoughts and opinions from different biases; you don't always know where all the biases come from. Lately, to separate NotebookLM from Gemini, I fill a single notebook with sources from a single content creator. That way, when I make a query, I know my biases are just the opinions from one person or that person's team. I consider these notebooks a Ghost because the responses are based on what that person has said or wrote; and the notebook has the potential to live on even after the person stops creating content.

Been reading about copyrights and rights to privacy and have decided to no longer share my Ghost notebooks. But it's a real and fascinating concept if you choose to make one in private of another person or of yourself.