Google's new NotebookLM just changed the game — this is everything you need to know in one video!

NotebookLM from Google is one of the best AI tools available right now. It's been around since 2023. I've used it almost every single day since. Now, if you haven't used NotebookLM before, it's an AI-powered research assistant from Google, and it works in a really unique way. All your knowledge is organized into individual notebooks, and you could upload your own sources of information. So you could upload PDFs, for example, links to websites, link to YouTube videos, and then you could use AI to get knowledge and research directly extracted from that information. Now, in this one video, I'm going to show you everything NotebookLM has to offer, including creating things like mind maps with your own notes, turning your notes into interactive podcasts, and even turning your notes with one click into an entire video. So you could access NotebookLM at notebooklm.google, and I'm going to show you first the free plan and everything the free plan has to offer, and then we'll switch over to NotebookLM Pro at the end of the video. There are some things worth upgrade that I'll mention then. Now, here's a brand new account, a free account, and to create a notebook where everything is organized, you just press create a notebook button here. And this is the very first thing you could do with NotebookLM. You could create notebook usually about a specific topic, so all your notes, all your sources that you have online are organized into an individual notebook. Right over here, you could upload sources by dragging and dropping it, or clicking here to choose them from your computer. And they could be different things like PDFs, text files, markdowns, audio files. You could upload any of that here. On the bottom, this is one of my favorite option is you could actually bring things from your Google Drive. So I usually have my notes organized into Google Docs or Google Slides. I will bring those here. In the center, you could even bring in things from individual websites. You just type in a link of a website, and you could also bring in YouTube video links. That is helpful. And you could just copy text here if you have text in your notes app, for example. You could just copy and paste that over here. And if you see on the bottom, it says zero out of 50. So you have 50 individual different types of documents, and you could mix and match. So you could have 10 YouTube videos, 10 PDFs, and 10 audio files, for example, inside of an individual notebook. So that's the very first thing I wanted to show you with NotebookLM is creating notebooks from all these different sources, and then using AI on the next page to interact with them. Okay, the next thing I wanted to show you is summarizing your documents, and you could do this really, really fast with NotebookLM. So I have added just one document. As soon as you add on the previous page I showed you, it brings you right here inside of NotebookLM. And anytime you want to add more sources, you could just press add, brings you back to this page. So I only have one out of 50. I dropped a text file here, but you could add more from this page as well. And all I have to do now to summarize it is I have to click that source, and this is the summary that I just got here in real time. This is the summary of that text document, and it shows you the key topics here so you could dive a bit deeper. So this is a fantastic way to get yourself an instant summary in one click by uploading any type of source. Now, the next thing I wanted to show you is asking questions with chat. So as long as you have at least one available source over here, and you could again add a lot more, in the center, you could ask AI to help you go through this document or multiple documents. Now, this is powered by Google Gemini, one of the best AIs available today. The nice thing is it also will know what your information is all about, and it will give you some recommendation prompts over here too. So this script I just uploaded was actually about NotebookLM. So if I go ahead and type this out, or press one of these suggestions, it will quickly give me an answer here, and you could see I only have one source, but it will give you these little annotations, and it will show you where it got that information from. And the nice thing is this works like any AI chatbot. So I could just ask for a follow-up prompt to reformat this in just three key bullet points, and it will go to work again using Gemini, and here's the three key bullet points. Now, the next thing you have is you also have this discover tab right here. So if you press this, you could actually get Gemini, Google Gemini in the background to go and find you things. So I'm going to ask for Google NotebookLM for work use cases. I'm going to go ahead and submit that, and it's going to go search the web and find me bunch of different sources that I could add to this specific notebook here. Okay, it found me bunch of different docs, it found me a YouTube video, it found things that are on Reddit, and if I want to import all of them, I could import all 10 sources, or I could pick and choose which one I want to import. But if I import them now, you see my notebook is populated with a lot more information than just that initial text document that I uploaded. So what documents can NotebookLM process? I'll click on this, and now you could see these little numbers make a lot more sense, right? They're coming from not just source number one, but all these other sources as well. Now, next one is creating podcasts or what NotebookLM calls audio overviews. So on the right side, you'll have this panel here, and with any of these panels, if you don't need them, you could collapse them and it will change it to these little icons. But this right here, audio overview, is one of the most viral things that ever came out in the world of AI. So let me demo this for you. If you click this, it will generate a podcast between two AI hosts based on your own documents. It's one of my all-time favorite things. Now, the podcast is ready. It pulled it from nine sources, and it's about 17 minutes and 43 seconds. Let me play a little bit of it here for you so you get a sense of it. Information overload is, well, it's real. It really slows things down. Yeah, absolutely. Sifting through it all feels like a full-time job sometimes. So what if there was an AI assistant, like designed specifically for that challenge? What is NotebookLM at its core? Right. So basically, it's Google's personalized AI research assistant. It's built, you know, specifically to stop those AI hallucinations where the AI just makes stuff up. That's a big deal compared to a lot of general chatbots out there. Okay, I think you get the idea here, and that's another benefit of NotebookLM. It actually is going through your handpicked sources that you gave it as your knowledge base. So it usually is a lot more useful than general AI chatbots, even Google Gemini that goes and searches the web for you. Now, the next one I wanted to show you is right next to audio overview is called video overview. And with NotebookLM, you could now transform all your sources into an AI-generated slideshow video, and it has really interesting visuals that go along with it. So I'm going to click on this now, and I'll show you exactly what you get out of this option. Okay, the video is done. Let's go ahead and click on it here, and I'll make it a full screen and play a bit of it for you. Hey everyone, and welcome. Today, we are diving into a tool that I've started using pretty much daily, and honestly, it's a total game changer for anyone who has to deal with a lot of information. We're talking about Google's NotebookLM. So, here's what we're going to do. We're going to break it all down. We'll kick things off with what NotebookLM actually is. Then we'll get into its secret weapon, what's called the source-grounded advantage. After that, I'll walk you through how you can go from just a pile of documents to some real actionable insights. Okay, let me scrub through some other points of this so you could kind of see it created all kinds of different visual for us, and you could see the voice is very natural, same as the audio overview function, but really, really useful way to get through a lot of different documents this way. Now, this style of video is definitely useful, but it's a lot like an upgraded PowerPoint presentation. But I want to show you how to level that up. We're going to go ahead and combine this video from NotebookLM with HeyGen, the sponsor of today's video, and I want to show you how to get something really unique from combining those two. Now, if you haven't used HeyGen before, it's an AI video platform that lets you create life-like avatars to streamline the whole video creation process. They have something called a digital twin though that I wanted to show you that enables creators like me to clone themselves into a hyper-realistic AI avatar. And now this runs on their new AI motion engine, and when combined with their AI avatar 4 technology, it creates avatars that look and feel more realistic than I've ever seen. So this updated digital twin allows you to upload a real video of yourself. So I actually uploaded the beginning of this video that I just recorded, and it just doesn't capture the face, it captures your authentic expression, natural gestures, and unique body language. And this is the first technology of this kind in the whole world. Okay, to create a video, I'm just going to click on my clone here, and I'm going to go ahead and create a landscape video directly from here. Next, I'm going to bring that NotebookLM video that I've downloaded. So I just have to go to this media tab. You could upload any type of video. This is the NotebookLM video I've already uploaded, and I'm going to set this as my background, and I'm going to take my video here, and I'm already using avatar 4 here, so I'm going to make sure that's turned on, and I'm going to go ahead and shrink this down to the corner right over here. Now, on the left side, I'm going to use my own cloned voice, but I'm going to bring in the audio here. So upload audio, it's going to let me upload that same audio that I got from the NotebookLM video that I have over here. And since I want my own voice, not this audio, I'm going to go ahead and click this, and I'm going to turn this audio into text that will just transcribe it for me over here. And I just have to press generate on top. Okay, does this sound familiar to you? Maybe you're a student prepping for exams or a researcher with just stacks of papers or a project manager trying to juggle meeting notes, reports, and all that stakeholder feedback. It feels like a constant flood, right? PDFs, web links, videos, notes, everywhere. And just trying to keep it all straight, let alone find the actual insights inside, well, it can feel pretty much impossible. And I'll include a link in the description to the new digital twin inside of HeyGen, so you could try it out for yourself. Thanks for HeyGen for sponsoring this video. Okay, the next thing I wanted to show you is actually part of audio overview, but it's called interactive podcast. So that audio overview I created has this little icon called interactive mode, where you could actually interrupt the podcasters and ask them questions. It's a really, really useful learning tool. So let me show you how this works. So all you have to do is play the regular podcast, but then you could join and interrupt. You know that feeling, right? It's like the digital version of being buried under paper. Stacks of articles, uh, a mountain of research. Oh, wait. Someone wants to join. Hey, go for it. Hey, sorry, I only have like 15 seconds. Can you tell me what all this is all about in 15 seconds? Absolutely. We can totally do that for you. So in a nutshell, we're talking about Google NotebookLM. It's your personalized AI research assistant, designed to help you make sense of loads of information fast. You upload all your documents, like PDFs, web links, even YouTube videos. And NotebookLM then summarizes them, finds key insights, and answers your questions using only your sources. And then it naturally, actually resumes back after it answers your question into the podcast that it already generated. So this is very, very useful. Okay, next on our list is this option called mind maps. So with mind maps, it turns your sources into an interactive diagram and visually maps out your key topics and their connections. So let me go ahead and create this one for you. And this is the mind map from this source, and you could dive deeper in any of these by just clicking the mind map. It will expand it out here for you, and then it will also ask the chat for a follow-up answer here, again pulling those from your sources in the center. And you could click this right here, and this will expand all the different notes here in the mind map. And let me just zoom out here. I mean, it created all these different related topics here, and again, you could zoom in and explore each one and then use chat to interact further. Now, on the reports, you have a few different useful things. So the first one I want to show you is briefing docs. If you click a briefing doc option, it generates from your notes a briefing doc. It's usually two to three pages, and it's a great summary of all your sources all at once. This is a little bit different than when you click on a source, and you got this summary overview. This is from your entire knowledge base here on this notebook, and it's one of my favorite things to do when I create a notebook. The next one is called a study guide. So again, this is another useful option that converts all your sources into a study guide. And the study guide will create quizzes with questions and answers for you. It will also give you essay format questions, a glossary of key terms here on the bottom. You have FAQ here, so FAQ exactly what it sounds like. It's going to make frequently asked questions based on the notes that you have, all your sources. And in this case, it created eight different questions for us. Now, this next one, timeline is also very useful. So anything that has a timeline order to it, like historical events or project milestone, any type of education content where a timeline makes sense, this will be really useful. And in this case, I started a notebook about the evolution of Google Gemini, and it gave me a timeline just like that. Now, anytime you create any type of a doc like this, or you add any type of note, you could convert this note into a source. So it will have the more compressed version instead of all these sources, you could add this right here to a source, and it moves it here on the left side. So this will show you that timeline as the source, so then I could easily chat with it, and it will always be a part of my knowledge base too. And by the way, any of these could be turned off here. So if you want to have a chat, but not use all these documents, you could individually turn any of these off, or you could turn everything off and just chat with one document by selecting it this way too. And another really useful option is adding your own notes manually. So you'll see this option that says add note. So let's say as I'm going through this, I have my own thoughts, my own ideas, I could just type that in, and I could convert my own notes into a source, and it will move them here to the left side too. Next, let me show you how to analyze YouTube videos, one of my favorite ways to use NotebookLM. So here inside of a new notebook, instead of choosing the traditional sources that I'm showing you so far, we're going to go ahead and choose YouTube this time, and you just have to paste a YouTube link here. And with the YouTube video added over here, you could ask any type of a question here, and anything I showed you so far, like clicking that link, you will get that summary over here, you will get the key topics over here, and then you could ask any type of follow-up questions like this using chat. So this is one of my favorite ways to interact with longer videos. So for example, this video, it's something like 30 minutes long. Well, this gives me a quick overview, and I do all the things that I show you so far, right? This gave me the key summary quickly, but usually I'll get a briefing doc. If I want to dive deeper, I'll even create like a video or audio overview, and if I want to put this out publicly or internally, I might combine it with AI avatars and things like that to make a new type of content from an existing video. Now, you also have this option that again is very useful where you could interact with individual website links or multiple different links. And all you need is the URL from that website. So let's say I'm researching generative AI, I could take this link over here, I go back to my notebook, I paste that link, I insert it, and all the things I've shown you so far become available based on this link. So I could get my quick summary over here, and then all the other options that I've shown you so far are available for interacting with any individual website links or a combination of multiple different links. Now, with the free plan, they make it really easy to share these notebooks. So right on top, you have a share option, and you could copy the link from here, or you could add people to this NotebookLM project, and this works a lot like Google Docs or anything inside of your Google Drive. So if you use Google products, this is very familiar to you. Now, let me show you Notebook in the Pro plan. So with the Pro plan, you're going to get a lot more usage. So you could get five times more audio overviews, you could create more notebooks, you could ask more questions, and you get up to 300 sources per notebook instead of the 50 that I showed you in the free plan. And there is some other option here that I want to show you with my paid account. You have this option right here where you could configure your notebook. So this will allow you to customize how the notebook actually interacts with you. So for example, the conversational style, you could change that. So if you are analyzing something, this might make more sense than the default that we had in the free plan, and the length of the response also could be changed. So if you really want just short answers, this will change that, and then you could save that. So all the chats you're having with your sources will follow these instructions here that you don't otherwise have with the free plan. And with the paid plan, the sharing option actually looks a whole lot different, right? So you're going to have different options like a welcome note that you could add, you could restrict this notebook, so this is very, very useful. So instead of anyone with a link, it will be restricted to people that you invite, and you could change how the viewers could access it. So it could be just the chat, so they could chat with your knowledge base, but not see the entire notebook, or just a notebook. This is probably one of the best options available with the paid plan, and you also get analytics. So when you share this with someone, you could see how other people have interacted with it. Now, that's your crash course of everything NotebookLM could do, but I have a three-hour course showing you lots of practical examples on how you could utilize it for work and business. So I'll put a link in the description to that. That's part of SkillLeap, our e-learning platform, and we have a free trial right now. So you can watch this course, but we have well over 25 different courses, seven different instructors, a live community, and all kinds of different resources that you get with a subscription if you stay past the free trial. I also made a similar video about Perplexity AI and everything that app could do, and I'll link that over here too.