#145 Learn 80% of NotebookLM in 20 Minutes (Features Most People Miss)

#145 Learn 80% of NotebookLM in 20 Minutes (Features Most People Miss) Speaker 2: What if you could turn any document into a mind map, an infographic, an audio overview and more for free? Well, that's exactly what NotebookLM allows you to do. So in this episode, Paul Noon, otherwise known as The AI Professor, is going to walk us through NotebookLM Live. This is a free tool from Google that he's been using to help businesses adopt AI for the past 18 months. Doing it long before it was considered cool. And he said something that stuck with me in this episode. He said, if businesses don't start using AI, they're going to go out of business. It's that simple. So we're going to check out this tool and how you can apply it to your business. Let's dive in. All right, Paul Noon, otherwise known as The AI Professor, what are we going to learn today? Speaker 1: We're going to look at NotebookLM, what I use it for every day, maybe not every day, but pretty much very regularly in my business life and a bit private life as well. Speaker 2: Awesome. And I think NotebookLM is one of the most underrated AI tools out there right now. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about it. I think there's a lot of ways that it can be used really effectively. So you're going to kind of share your screen and show us some of your favorite use cases. But before you do that, before you share screen, why don't you just give us a quick background? Like, why should people listen to you? Speaker 1: Sure, happy to. So I'm not a technical expert on AI, but I've been making videos for about 18 months. I work with businesses right across, I'm based in the UK, in Coventry, in the West Midlands, work with businesses right across the West Midlands, helping them to really understand this technology. And that's really my passion. I want businesses to start using AI, because I think if they don't, they're going to go out of business. And that's really important for me. So I want jobs, I want good jobs. So yeah, that's what I'm about. As I said, I'm not a technical expert. It's about using it for real world things, getting value out of it. Where it doesn't work, then fine, don't use it. Where it does work, then absolutely. Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, why don't you go ahead and share your screen and let's jump into Notebook LM and some of the tips that you have for us today on it. Speaker 1: Sure. Give me a sec. Speaker 2: And this episode was inspired by a video that you did actually a few months ago where I think it was your top 25 notebook LM tips. So that's what prompted me to reach out to you and say like, hey, that was a great video. Let's do a deeper dive. So for folks that want to check that out, be sure to go check Paul's channel, which of course will link in the description below and go check out that video. And this is a little bit of a deeper dive on that video. Speaker 1: Sure. So here we are in NotebookLM. If you've not used it before, notebooklm.google.com. Go there and you can just sign in. And the beauty of NotebookLM is it's free. And we don't get a lot of free stuff in life. But as you can see, these are some of my notebooks. I've used it a lot, a lot. And I get real value out of it. And what it's really, let's go into one I can show you. Let's have a look at this one. So what it's really about is bringing in documents, either you can search for documents, And then you can do stuff with them. And this is an example, the UK produced an industrial strategy about nine months ago, and it's complex, there's loads of documents, there's loads of words in it, and how do you create a, you know, a brief for my bosses at work, this is coming out, what do we need to know about it, Paul? And so just dragging all of those documents in, and I'll go through some of this in a minute, in how it actually works, dragging all of these documents in, and then you can produce a report, you can produce Graphics about it. This is a slide deck that I produced. NotebookLM gives you access to a whole load of these tools. I'll go through a few of them and we'll go from the sort of very basic and work up a little bit as we go through. So let's create a new notebook. And Corey and I were talking about ClaudeBot earlier. So one of the things you can do is just search for sources. So you can add in the sources that you've got or you can search for them. So I'm going to say ClaudeBot Malt, book, just put some things in there and it will go off and find research and at this point it's just looking for articles, papers, videos, all that sort of stuff on a particular subject. Which is really cool. And then once it goes in, so it's found seven documents. I could push it further. So this was a fast research. You can go and do deep research if you want. But it's found seven documents and you can take them out. You can view them or you can just import them and it will just bring them in to NotebookLM. And first thing it does is it will create a sort of summary. So it talks about ClaudeBot. You can title it. Let's give it a title. This is a really cool bit of technology that's only been out for a few weeks, but absolutely taken the Internet by storm and AI users by storm. I'm not using it. Go on. It's crazy powerful and really interesting. I've been getting it to do work for you in the background, but some stories of it sort of taking people out of their jobs and spending money on their behalf. I think I will have to have a word with my wife before I get more book. ClaudeBot. It's had three names. ClaudeBot, MoltBot, and I think it's called OpenClaw, something like that. Speaker 2: Yeah, OpenClaw now. Speaker 1: Maybe, something like that. So it's OpenClaw, that's right. And it has meant that people have been buying Mac minis to run it on and X has been full of pictures of people with their Mac minis. And I think one of the really cool things is that they've created this thing called Maltbook, which is a bit like Facebook or Reddit, just for the bots. And then it's gone a bit bonkers. So anyway, I've done the research. It's given me a summary and you can do a whole series of things about this and actually I've done this relatively recently with a similar product. My boss said I've heard about this. I managed to do some research on it and then just produce a report for him, a briefing document. It will produce it nice and quickly based on these documents over here on the left. So it sort of locks it down. It doesn't go out and find new information. It will find them and keep uploaded and that's quite powerful. You can also, I'll set some of these going because they might take a little bit of time. You can get a mind map, a quiz, flashcards, infographic. I'll set some of these going because they will take a bit of time to produce. It's actually not going too bad today. But here we've got our first report. And basically it gives you an executive summary, tells you what it's about, where it's come from, Claude, Bob, Malt, Bob, OpenClaude. So it's found the information. 10 second disaster, core capabilities. So if you're thinking about putting OpenCLR on your computer, do this research first. You might learn something. It might stop you from really messing up. Speaker 2: And so Paul, one thing I want to just cut in and ask, so I'm sure a lot of people watching this and I even heard people say this themselves. It's like, well, what's the difference between NotebookLM and just using like a Google Gemini or a Claude or a ChatGPT? So my understanding is that it allows you to pull in source resources, whether it's documents or papers or websites, and then you can synthesize data based on just the sources. It's not going to go out to the Internet. It's not going to give its opinion. It's like, what sources do you give it? And then it gives you your output based on the sources that you give it. Is that an accurate understanding as far as how it differs from like a Gemini? Speaker 1: Yeah, very much. And of course, it was sort of set up as a sort of study tool. So if you think if you're studying a particular course, and you have a whole load of course materials, You can put the course materials in and then ask it questions, get a study guide, infographics, that sort of thing, just based on that course material. And you know that it's relevant to the course that you're doing. And I think that's really what it was set up to do. But of course there are so many other use cases for it. And being able to use your own documents, the documents that you've created that might not be available on the web, Adding web stuff. You can also go through these documents and decide actually I don't want to use that. I don't like this particular one. You can deselect it or select stuff. You can keep adding to it. I think on the free version you can have up to 50 documents in a notebook which is a lot. If you've got The paid Google account you can I think you can have up to a hundred documents. I don't think I've reached the limit. I've got a paid Google account and then and I'll show you maybe if you remind me at the end you can also use these directly in Gemini so you can create your knowledge and then just effectively link Gemini to it and then you've got the the full power of Gemini to use your notebook. But yeah, you're absolutely right. It's about Really putting a barrier around your data sources, your web sources, etc. So that you know that you're only focusing on the key things. Certainly in my business, I use it with internal documents that are not available on the web or things that we're drafting where I might want to do some activity with it and it's a safer place than Having your LLM open to the whole web. So yeah, absolutely. So all of these things are now done and to be honest I can tell you it sometimes takes a little bit longer than this. So we've seen the report. One of the really cool things is this MindMap. I'm really useful. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I like that. Speaker 1: If you're doing creative stuff, then having a MindMap and looking at the different areas, so you've got this sort of, this is the Malt Book, Malt Bot ecosystem, you've got Claude Bot, and then it will break it down for you, so the creator, and you can go and look at documents that refer to him. Is it Peter Steinberger? And it will find the documents, it will analyze the content, find the actual documents that reference that person. So you can use it to go backwards and forwards. It's taking a little bit of time right now. Oh, there we go. So it tells you about him, an Austrian developer. It shows you here the different references, the documents that are over here, etc. So it's something that If you're trying to really get your head under the skin of a particular subject, this can be really, really powerful. And I certainly use these sort of infographic things, this mind map. I think it's really useful and it gives you, if you're writing a document or you're thinking, in my case, if I'm thinking about putting a video together, this can be a really good way of breaking down that video into chunks that make sense. So I think it's one of the most useful tools that are there. Right, let us go back to the studio. Quiz can be really good. I think really good for Students, so if you're learning either creating flashcards or a quiz can be a really good way of My daughter is doing some learning at the minute and she's set it up. She's as good as I am. She's set up her NotebookLM. She has her course material in there. And then if there's a particular area where she's expecting an exam at college or a quiz, etc., she can set out a quiz and have a go at it. Does it support learning? It gives you a bit of confidence. And sometimes I think that's often what people need to know that they really understand the subject. Flashcards, I've talked about that. This is one of the coolest things, I think. It'll take a second just to load up. Speaker 2: So from this almost like an infographic generator here. Speaker 1: From those documents, it has created an infographic. And certainly when I'm presenting, I prefer to present to a set of pictures than a whole load of slides. It will create slides actually, but I prefer to present to a picture and sort of walk people through those pictures. And it can be a... I've literally just produced that one while we've been here. You can go back and get it to do multiple goes. And this can be a really powerful thing. A really good way, if you've got a subject, something you need to get your head under the skin of, NotebookLM can be really good. I'm just going to show you, I'm going to go back and just show you some of the, one area, I was working with some colleagues in the university and we are building We were building a program for the teaching of teachers and we had a big document, this big document here. Which is just text. Somebody put a lot of effort into this text and they were explaining it and struggling away. That's exactly what was happening and I was there and I put it into NotebookLM and created an infographic. I think I've done two or three. That isn't the one I like the best. Let's find maybe this one. Literally, there we go. That's how I sat there. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, this looks good. Speaker 1: Yeah, and all of the steps are there. The text, I think there was one, I think we found one error in the text, but we were able to go and change that. But it just brought it to life. And somebody was sort of struggling away, trying to go through this big document, explain where they were. And suddenly this picture appeared on the screen. I said, there you go, work with that. And It just worked. People just got it straight away. They could see the transition, the different stages, what we were doing, what was important in the sort of learner journey. It really made a big difference and it brought it alive. It was one of the most powerful uses of this technology I've seen where basically the room just stopped and got it straight away. The person was just really struggling with it. Speaker 2: So Paul, something I noticed is like there's obviously a lot of great use cases here for students and for learning and for research, but is there any, I guess, way you can think of to apply it to like a small business, right? So let's say I'm a small business owner and I own a, I don't know, like a plumbing company, right? Like is this a tool that's really mainly geared towards like students and people learning and researching or is it something that can be applied to the world of small business too? Speaker 1: No, absolutely. I would definitely think that you could use it for small business. I'm just having to think about whether it's an obvious thing to do. So, one of the things I've been doing is generating, trying to generate a sort of AI governance policy. Now, maybe a plumber doesn't need this. But thinking about, if you were thinking about who your competitors are, Who's working in the market? You might have some demographics. You might want to, because you can put in websites and things like that. You don't have to when you're uploading documents. You can upload files. You can upload websites and videos. One of the things I sometimes do is upload people that I watch on YouTube if I'm wanting to get information about something. I think I did one on ClaudeBot. There's some videos from Matthew Berman and others about it and it will take that information You can obviously get them from your own drive or you can just bang text in. So I think if you're looking to maybe do some policies for your staff, you might be wanting to create an infographic for your website that talks about your business, what your key win themes are, those sorts of things, putting all that information in. And remember this stays there. You can go back You know time after time and just and the information that you put up there continues to be there. So you can keep going back and creating new assets for your business on that basis. You can, it will do analysis of sales that sort of thing. So I did some, I made some dummy sales data and then said What did I say here? Give me the top trends and anomalies and weekly metrics and what I should investigate next. So putting your sales data in and then getting it to do some analysis of that can be a really powerful thing. If you wanted a partnership or you were working with another company and you wanted to produce a slide deck or something like that, this is a great place to do it. You can click over here and it will give you a slide deck of whatever you've put in on the left-hand side. It will create a sensible slide deck on the right-hand side. So building up one of these for your business with your products and services, information about your business, your website, all of that sort of thing, maybe competitors, and then asking it questions. Obviously, it's got all that information. Information that you wouldn't be able to grab hold of straight in ChatGPT. You'd have to load it all up. It keeps it all in one place. You can keep going back to it and keep interrogating it. That's, I guess, what I would use it for in a small business context. Speaker 2: And I really see it as a way to, I mean, you can kind of just visually display any of the data that you have. So like, for example, if I'm a plumber, right, and I have five or six different services, and maybe I have those services on my website, or maybe I have them in a Google Doc, I can put that Google Doc into NotebookLM and then have it create A slideshow depicting my services. I could have it create an infographic describing my services. I could have it create a mind map. I could turn, let's say for example, if I'm a professional services firm and I've got all these SOPs that we've developed over the years and I'm onboarding a new employee. I could dump all my SOPs into NotebookLM and turn them into a quiz that I give to my new employee to make sure that after they're onboarding, as long as they pass the quiz, they're ready to go, right? So there's, I think there's a lot of things you can do with it as a small business. I think you've got to get a little creative, but it seems to me like the most obvious use cases are around like data visualization and just, yeah, ways to kind of depict the data that you already have. Speaker 1: So this is my AI governance framework and I absolutely did exactly as you said, created a quiz for my team to be able to go through, check that they've learned, check that they understand it, they know what to do when a problem happens. I created some flashcards, you know, who holds the final sign-off authority for high-risk items at theprofessor.ai. You click on it. Me. I take responsibility. But of course, you know, people I work with, they can go through this. It's a great way of learning. And, you know, it's funny. It's not going to answer everything. It's not going to change a business forever. But these are tools I think can really help people become more efficient. Give messages over in a different way. You know, I think people enjoy variety, you know, an infographic. I think I've probably created an infographic for this for my team. Let's have a look. Yeah, so this is my, again, I always seem to pick the one I didn't choose, but this is an infographic, human in the loop accountability. Humans have to take account for what they're doing. I'm transparent, which is basically all the time. Classification on risks and then the life cycle that we use. The how I often use synthetic media. So I often generate media and then, you know, minimize the personal data that people use. Right. I created this so that I could, I only have one member of staff, but I do have some colleagues that I work with outside of the business and it was able to show how I try and govern the use of AI in my business. So I think every business that might be using this technology, and I hope every business is, this might be something that you'd want to pull together. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Now, I can already think of different ways that I could use it in my business, especially if you're someone creating content or you're creating a lot of written content or you need infographics made or even thumbnails made for YouTube, that type of stuff. I could see this being really valuable for that. So, Paul, are there any other use cases or any other kind of features you want to show us in NotebookLM? Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm going to go into Gemini. So one of the things you can do with Gemini is you can add NotebookLMs in. Speaker 2: Oh, interesting. So instead of having to go back and forth and copy and paste, it can just sync right up to Gemini, you're saying? Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Very, very cool. And so this is a big UK company on BAE Systems. And so now I've got access to All of the power of Gemini. So if I want to create, you know, really big reports that I can fiddle with and mess with. If I want to create a website, I can go in and now prompt that and it will use the information Not from Gemini. I won't go out and get it. It just takes the information from NotebookLM. Really, really powerful. And so for that, for your small company, if you're wanting to create some marketing material, etc., and you want to use NanoBanana, you can make your notebook and then attach it to Gemini and then say, OK, I now need marketing material for this activity. Really, really cool. And I think it's pretty recent that they've allowed you to do this, but it's something I use regularly. So if you find that you're hitting the barriers, the edges of NotebookLM, you can just drag it into Gemini and you've got the whole Gemini suite then to go at. That's really powerful. Speaker 2: It almost seems like NotebookLM is like a pre-step before using an LLM like a Gemini or a ChatGPT. Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. Speaker 2: So it's like with NotebookLM, it's like you're plugging in the data sources that you're kind of consolidating or that you've kind of curated and then from there you're able to manipulate those data sources into different formats without the internet just by using the data sources that you gave it and then once you have your desired output, Like you said, then you could then go and plug it into Gemini and then use that to add other elements from the internet or iterate on it further at that point. But that's kind of the way that I see it fitting into the whole ecosystem. Speaker 1: I agree and I think it allows you to put those guardrails around the data that you're using either in Gemini or in NotebookLM. You have more control of where the information comes from because you can select them, deselect them, you can add your own stuff in, you can create documents and then add that to your list of You can add it to your list of sources. So you create a document and, you know, if I want this quiz to become a source, you can... Sorry, I've done that wrong. You want it to become a source, you can just create it and add it as a source in your documents, which is very cool. There you go. You can convert all your notes to a source, convert to a source, or export to documents. So these become assets that you can have and you can then move them over here if you want to build over time. So if you're that small services company, you've made some information for your clients, you can then push it over to this side and it becomes a source for any future things that you do. That's a really helpful thing so you can build up your sources over a period of time. Speaker 2: Right, so it's kind of like an asset that's compounding. It's like you continue to, as you build up those sources, that's more source material for doing further things with the data in NotebookLM. And then once you hook it up to Google Gemini from there, it's like, hey, we can go ham with this. We can do just about anything with it at that point. Speaker 1: The world's your oyster at that point, yeah. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, I love it. Speaker 2: No, this has been awesome. And so any other tips on NotebookLM or any other features you think we should test out with it? Speaker 1: I would say, I mean I've covered quite a bit here. I would say use it and play with it. It's a tool that is developing all of the time. You can share stuff with other people and then you get analytics about what they do with documents. You can choose people to share things with. You can work with people collaboratively on notebooks. But what I would suggest is, especially if you've got a specific subject area, and that subject area might be your business, it might be your new product line, it might be a competitor, where you're gathering information together and then you want to do something with that information. This is a really powerful tool. As I said, it won't answer everything, but it's something I go back to regularly because it does the job. I mean, there are other features. One of the things, I won't generate them, but you can create an audio overview. So if you've got a big subject, and I have done this, If you've got a subject that you're interested in, like Claude Boss or something like that, and you want to learn about it, you can effectively create a podcast about it. And you basically just click it. It takes a bit of time. This is probably not the most interesting thing to do it on, but you can create an audio overview and then you can save it. You can download it as a MP3 file. And then in the car on the way there, you can Play it. Listen to it. I did some work. Did some work on the industrial strategy. I had to go to Yorkshire to do a presentation and I'm pretty sure. What was it? I'm just trying to think which one it was. I don't think it was this one. I think it was. This is one I did just in case I couldn't show you something today. Maybe it was this one. Where I created an audio overview and a presentation and you can even create a video overview so it will create a video with a voice on it. I'm not sure I would just present that. I prefer to talk myself. But it is a way of finding another way of learning something, of getting your head around something, is creating these audio overviews. And well worth doing. It's very cool. I was trying to... Speaker 2: I didn't even realize that was a feature. And what I think would be cool, too, is for somebody, like, for example, I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I don't have all the time in the world to listen to podcasts. So I could go into NotebookLM and plug in the most recent episode of my favorite podcast as a source material and then have it just create an audio overview of it. So instead of me having to listen to the full 30-minute episode, I could just get like a 60-second overview of the episode, right? So I just have to listen to 60 seconds instead of 30 minutes. Speaker 1: Absolutely. So here I have got an audio overview here. So this is my PhD, which is a massive document. I mean, it's 100,000 words in the document. And I created an audio overview, just slightly worried that we're going to get loads of echo on this in a second, I might have to turn my mic off. Here we go. Speaker 2: And I actually don't know if we'll be able to hear the sound through the screen because I can't hear it right now so. Yeah, so I don't think we can hear audio through the screen. Speaker 1: It's always a bit of a drama to show it. I have to plug in headphones, so I'm getting it fed through the microphone. This is my PhD. I created an audio overview, as much as anything, so my son could find out what I spent four years studying. Speaker 2: Doing, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And if you want what's cool what's cool about that feature too is I mean like you said you just took a 100,000 word essentially report and yeah We've compiled it into a 15-minute audio overview. You can do that with anything. Think about apps that have gotten big from doing that with books. You've probably heard of Blinkist and these other apps that take a 200-page book and consolidate it into a 10-minute audio overview. You could do that on your own now with this exact tool. I didn't even know it could do the audio overviews, which I think is really cool. Speaker 1: They are very, very cool. And yeah, you can just download it. You can download it. Speaker 2: Oh, so you can download it right there from one page? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, which is really useful. And yeah, as I say, it's a great way of, and as I showed you, I've got a, you know, it is 100,000 words and it produced a single infographic about my research. And it's good. It's right. It's sensible. It's picked out the key issues. It's so cool. You know, it would take me months to put that together myself. And somebody who hadn't written it, it would take them years. This produced it in seconds. Fantastic. Speaker 2: So that infographic you just showed us, if you had to go in and synthesize the key points from that 100,000 word distillation, that infographic was pretty accurate. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I know it because I wrote it. Speaker 2: That's what I'm saying. If anybody would know, it's you. So if you're saying like, oh, it nailed it, like it was spot on, that to me is really impressive. Speaker 1: Yeah, it blew me away. Because it's a, you know, it's a complex subject and it absolutely picked out the key strategies, the key points, the new knowledge that I found in my PhD, it picked it out, it's really cool, very good. Speaker 2: That is awesome. Yeah, clearly a very powerful tool. So we appreciate you coming on and kind of giving us the under-the-hood look on it. Is there anything else we should touch on when it comes to NotebookLM before we kind of wrap up? Speaker 1: I don't think so. I think it's just have a go. Use it. It's impressed me, no doubt. I use it all the time, as I say. I think, interestingly, I've used it a lot for my own stuff at home, for synthesizing information, for doing videos and those sorts of things. But in the business context, I've been really, you know, that moment when I was able to create that infographic For my team that was struggling to sort of get their head around quite a complex subject and they went, all right, we get it now. And it literally lifted us. We might have spent a week going through that and the picture just brought it to life. I think there's much more uses for it in the business arena than I probably thought of myself. And it's free. Don't cost you a penny. You know, all of that power that we've just been through, free. And as I say, there's not much free. Speaker 2: Yeah, that is the beauty of it is that it's completely free. Speaker 1: It's bonkers. It is. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Well, Paul, thank you so much for taking the time to come on here and educate us today. So everybody, definitely go and subscribe to Paul's YouTube channel, which we will link in the description below. But other than that, Paul, is there any place you want to point people or anywhere you want them to kind of come check you out? Speaker 1: So certainly come to the YouTube channel, the Professor-AI. But I've also got a website, so theprofessor.info, and what I do when I make my videos, I put all my prompts and stuff on there and there's some blogs there about things that interest me, including one about NotebookLM, but other things that I'm interested in, so check that out, happy to do that. And also, if you've got a question or you want me to look at something, From my particular perspective, i.e. not an expert, somebody who tries to get stuff done with AI, drop me a message and I'll do a video. I love doing stuff that viewers enjoy. That's why we do it, isn't it? That's why we do this. I want people to enjoy this technology, to get using it and to help their businesses grow. Speaker 2: Well, I love it. Well, Paul, thank you so much for the time, for the folks listening in the audience. We will be back next week as always, and we will talk to you soon.