Notebook LM

Introduction

If you have not yet experienced the joy that is Notbook LM I recommend you do it today.

Since discovering it a few weeks ago, I have used it just about every day, which either indicates there’s something not quite normal about me, or that it’s actually a very useful everyday tool. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Seriously though, it can really help you to organize your media, especially if, like me, you like to learn lots of different things, but have trouble making sense of all of the information, or forget where you read something.

Notebook LM stores everything away (probably in a vector database behind the scenes) in a way that allows you, or the AI llm, to retrieve and make sense of it all.

Notebook LM – from Google, Uses AI to help you gather documents in a topic of interest (or according to your prompt).

Once your documents, website links, YouTube links etc have been gathered together and uploaded, the AI fun begins. AI can auto generate study guides, mind maps, audio (AI generated podcast type conversations that you can also customize and interact with). In addition to this, you can chat about anything in your documents.

Use Cases

There are too many use cases to mention, but here are a few of my favourites:-

• User Manual Repository
• Topic to Study
• Ideas that you would like to discuss

I used to always struggle to find the user manual for something in and around my home, like for example the automatic cat litter machine, or the my car. Not any more. I just created a Notebook called Household, uploaded the manuals/user guides and I can just ask AI how I do something that’s contained within a manual. TIP – If you need to remember something in Notebook LM, don’t forget to use one of the build in features, like creating a Note, to save it. It’s not at the time of writing this Blog, saved automatically.

For studying, if you’re not sure what sources you’ll need, just start by asking AI to gather sources for you, based on a prompt you provide. It works pretty well, but you may need to tweak the sources a bit. Then once you have them, try generating the audio (in the Studio Tab) and creating a mind map. I found both of these features to be really useful when backed up by the information sources.

Have an idea? Just upload your thoughts as documents (or type text) and start brainstorming with AI

Be sure to have fun, but please don’t become as obsessed with it as I have, there are other pleasures in life.