NotebookLM Shakes Up Research, Yet Has Flaws

my mind is blown I made this this literature review with a 12w prompt look at it it's referenced it's got a great structure it is perfect for a paper or to start your literature review it's incredible and it comes down to using this free and I cannot believe it free tool from Google called notebook LM it's experimental look at that so it'll probably get a little bit better than this but this is what I think you should know about it so when you first log in this is what it doesn't look like it actually looks

like a blank version of this page without these notes and the first thing you need to do is upload your sources this bit here is blank so you click up this little plus icon Bonk and you can add sources now you can add up to 50 sources so that's 50 papers so if you're writing a literature review for a paper for um a thesis you can add up to 50 references and even put in a massive document like my thesis which was 255 pages and it only counted as one document love that so you can

put it in here you've also got Google Drive got links you got PEX all of the stuff get put in here and you can put in marketing plans course readings research notes this makes it easy to talk to multiple documents at once we've seen similar tools but this one really really does such a great job and you'll see why in a minute so the first thing that you do is head over to chat so down here we've got view chat you click that Bon and you can see in here you've got nine sources and this

is where the magic happens so the first thing I asked it with all of these selected you can unselect or just select the ones you want if you just want a particular uh paper to sort of like discuss but you click here select all sources and then I put down here can you help me understand the research focus of these papers and it did a summary of each individual paper for me here it's got a multi- approach to that that paper it's got accurate thickness measurement a graphine it's got my thesis which interestingly sometimes on

a big document like a thesis which is many hundreds of pages long it misses the last bit because of the um the number of tokens the number of information it can actually hold whereas here it knows that I've used f8bt P3 p p3ht PB pcbm which are much later on in my thesis however it doesn't do the device stuff which is really deep nonetheless it's got the important information for me to know about um the effect of calcium cathod blah blah blah so all of these are my papers and it gives me a nice sort

of like easy summary which is reference now the references I hit and miss but the information in this is correct for example if I click on one of these you can see that it takes me to the the figure where it's mentioned now when you upload information it does not include the images we'll talk about that in a minute but that was a big thing for me but nonetheless you do get a link straight to where it found that information really really great sometimes it links to like the wrong bits if you go to my

thesis for example uh where are we going uh where's my thesis here it is so sometimes it takes you to a weird part of the paper like this is my acknowledgement section um and for some reason it's highlighted that I have no idea why but really it's this bit I'm interested in sometimes it takes you to the references part of your paper which is a little bit confusing but nonetheless it does a pretty good job you just need to double check where it's referencing from but you should be doing that anyway you naughty little minks

all right so that is all of the stuff that I wanted to know about these papers and it gave me every single one that I selected as an individual summary so good now I can save that as a note you just click here save to note and now that it's saved to note it goes here into your notes page so you can see I've got some here but if I want to go back to chat I can click here view chat easy peasy blon and then I wanted to know more so down here you see

it recommends things that it thinks you should uh ask next and I just clicked on one of those and I asked what are the two main challenges blah blah blah and it gave me the two main challenges and it was all references look at this 1 2 3 4 5 let's click there and see what happens so I click on it and it takes me down to the aims and outline of my thesis let's click here and see what happens it's also got yeah look this bit it's a bit weird that it's references this but

I think it's interested really in this bit but for some reason it's got all of the like metadata from that paper up here but nonetheless it does direct me to where it found that information um and if I click here oh no actually let's go back here cuz that was a fun little thing that you should know about you can also sort of like highlight things and it says suggest related ideas summarize oh no it's all the way over here summarize add to note help me understand the selected notes so you can interact with the

papers that you select so once you select this part of a paper you can use these buttons down here to go deeper and understand the paper better fantastic all right what I really wanted to know is given all of this information from these nine things I uploaded can it give me a literature review and I wanted to know if it could do it with like very little prompting normally I say create a structure create um bullet points under that structure expand on paragraph so those are the techniques I would normally use to create a literature

review but I wanted to go in the deep end and see what it could do so here I've got a very simple prompt can you create a literature review for a paper using these sources I didn't say what sources I just said these sources cuz I assumed it would be all of these that were selected and this is what it gave me oh it starts so well because it starts at the top of the kind of information pyramid it starts nice and Broad so here we've got organic photo Vol opvs offer a promising route to

low cost that is exactly how I would start a literature review then we've got the issues with the current literature then we've got the promise and then we've got a like a bullet point here of the key advantages um and then it goes into more details and um challenges and future directions so if you are starting a literature review and you want to ask loads of documents and understand a load of documents and how they relate to each other this is a fantastic free way of doing that because you can obviously just select one paper

and talk to that but it gets even even better check out this all right then down here notebook guide I clicked on it and I was like what is this guide about click here you can see we've got help me to create fact study we got summaries all that sort of stuff but here is what I wanted to know audio overview when you first go here you've got a little button that says create audio overview and you click it and then you can go away do stuff come back and it generates this it is a

podcast from all of these sources it's 14 minutes long and this is what it sounds like print solar panel that's my favorite bit where it's so like starts out it's like okay get and it trips over its words nonetheless it gets better it gets really good in fact anything you know like your clothes Windows even entire buildings that's the kind of crazy future we're talking about today diving into the world of organic solar cells and it's a pretty big deal I mean we all know the deal with traditional solar cells right they work but they're

bulky expensive it's not exactly the most uh flexible things in the world exactly what it's a bloody conversation between two people that sounds natural and that is I think one of the biggest hurdles to this point that we've had with AI generated summaries is they don't sound natural we get people slipping up not speaking properly just like a real podcast backwards and forwards they seem to be cutting each other off and bouncing ideas off each other the natural speech patterns the communication the understanding of the science and making it a simple late person summary is

incredible but here's the thing I've listened to all of it and because this is very very technical very detailed information it's trying to kind of synthesize some of the very specific details it gets a little bit wrong and I know that because it's my research area so you have to be very careful if you're using this to kind of understand something because some of the very minute details are a little bit incorrect but nonetheless the overall aring understanding of these papers is there and dare I say it it's actually fun to listen to I'm going

to leave this at the end of uh yeah I'm going to leave this somewhere for you to listen to anyway because it's incredible also just go make your own because it's free it's so free that it's almost like stealing but organic solar cells they could be the answer lightweight flexible and way cheaper potentially at least but like with anything this Cutting Edge there are uh challenges ah why does it know to do that this is scary and the Andrew Stapleton thesis the Andrew Stapleton thesis it knows where it's getting this information anyway you know it

go try it for yourself I think you'll absolutely love it um and uh yeah crazy crazy stuff I think that's everything that you need to know about it I reckon you just dive deep into the notebook LM to see what it can do for you and I think if you've got 50 documents that you want to scan over this is the best way to do it at the moment for free go check it out I think you'll love it if you like this video go check out this one where I talk about academic research on

steroids with new AI tools go check it out for