How To Use NotebookLM 📝 Next Level Notetaking AI Knowledge Assistant

hello my name is Callum also known as water loots and welcome to this tutorial on Notebook LM your personal knowledge assistant notebook LM is AI software by Google that allows you to select specific sources that the AI can use to answer your questions PDFs audio files YouTube videos websites sources of all kinds can be added as a notebook a sort of micro AI that will answer questions based only on the sources included notebook LM provides a way to break down complex information across many sources helping you to move through massive amounts of information without getting

overwhelmed the best part it's both free and private notebook LM Google does not use your data your conversation or your sources for training their AI models this opens the door to using AI in entirely different ways including for business because you don't have to worry about confidentiality of giving up your information to an artificial intelligence model for training you can also ask the AI to generate reports briefs FAQs and even a conversation as a podcast format between two different AIS that talk about the sources you've included and the conversation that you've had with notebook LM

talking about the potential of AI and obsidian it's like a whole other level of possibility but it's exciting to imagine how AI could really supercharge our knowledge management it's honestly pretty mind-blowing in this video I'm going to walk through an overview of notebook LM including General use cases how to create your first notebook how to work with sources including YouTube videos audio files and markdown files from obsidian how to leverage citations in Notebook LM the chat feature including very important information on how to save your conversations The Notebook guide automated features that help you work

with your information The Notebook Library audio examples including meetings voice notes and recording of lectures how to generate an AI podcast along with customizing it which is a new feature how to generate new writing and video ideas and I'll also include additional example use cases and tips on how to maximize notebook LM for your own work there are a lot of benefits of using notebook LM that I'll touch on in this video each source that you add to notebook LM levels up your ability to gain insights and draw knowledge and sort through the information from

the sources that you've included by virtue of the conversation that you're having with the AI you can think of it almost like you're creating a short-term memory with the artificial intelligence based specifically on the sources that you've included it's a closed ecosystem that really helps you limit the information you include to help reduce that feeling of information overload I think that notebook LM is going to be a game changer for anyone that works with a lot of information knowledge workers most people that work in corporations creators writers Educators students list is literally endless anyone can

benefit from using notebook LM the goal is not to have ai replace you but to create a system where you feel comfortable working with AI to filter through the information that you consume on a regular basis to help reduce information overload while augmenting your personal Knowledge Management System okay now that I've explained a little bit about what notebook LM is who should use it and why you should should care about it I thought we would take a look at the website so I mean right off the bat think smarter not harder I love that mentality

working harder inste of smarter is one of the greatest frustrations I ever had working in the corporate world so any tool that can help me think better is a tool that I'm interested in trying out Google is really pitching this as a personalized AI research assistant and I think that's pretty accurate given how I've used notebook LM so far but I would also say that it works really well as just a personalized AI assistant what whether or not you're doing research it can be a great way for reflection on introducing your own files to notebook

LM using something like obsidian YouTube or your newsletter to draw insights into the deeper levels of what it is you're trying to build as a Creator or as a knowledge worker okay so once we click try notebook LM we get brought to notebook lm. goole.com you can see here this is what it looks like when you haven't made any notebooks yet if you're interested you can try an example notebook and it will provide you with some prompts on different op options on how to get started once you create a notebook you can upload your documents

and then you can ask questions about those documents that you've uploaded you can convert complex material into easy to understand formats so there's an automatic way to generate facts or briefing documents you can also start building up a knowledge base then share this with other people and they'd be able to see the insights that I'm deriving from notebook LM so to begin let's just click create and here you go right away you can see that Google is asking you to upload sources so I figured that the best place to start would be to walk through

the different sources that we can include so if you use Google Drive you can click on your Google Docs button and that will bring up a box with all of your Google Docs files so you'd be able to go through and search and select the Google Docs that you have included or you can also do this with Google Slides I don't use Google Drive or Google Docs I use obsidian for the most part so I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment the next option is to link a website or link a

YouTube video so if you link a YouTube video notebook LM will transcribe the entire YouTube video so that you can do text based searching through it you can also copy and paste in text directly or you can upload your Source by dragging and dropping or choosing files from your computer the supported files are PDF text documents markdown files and audio so markdown is how obsidian operates which is why I'm personally so excited for Notebook LM because I see this as an excellent counterpart for adding a short-term memory AI system to my long-term memory of obsidian

I can take different obsidian files that are private drop them into notebook LM to ask questions about it and know that my obsidian files are not being sent to Google for training their model so one of the most powerful features of notebook LM is that because I'm choosing the sources to upload that means that I can choose sources that are very recent I believe chat GPT 10's cut off date is October 2023 it's more than one year ago which leaves a lot of information that's at a date considering how quickly the world is updating what's

cool about notebook LM is I can choose for example specific YouTube videos to upload here and that will give me access to upto-date information you can think of notebook LM like that scene in The Matrix where Neo gets plugged in and upgrades his skills where he learns martial arts and a whole bunch of other things so let's take a look at my most recent YouTube videos I've been working on a series for obsidian and digital Gardens obsidian is my notetaking software that allows me to generate markdown files that I can then add to notebook LM

so as a quick example I figured why not go through and select my YouTube videos because some of them have just been updated within the last couple days so there's no way that Pat gbt would be able to give me updated information on these notes so let's go and copy the most recent note select YouTube and paste the YouTube video in cool so that was pretty quick once I have uploaded the video you can see that it's a YouTube Source on the side here so this is where all of our sources will be listed you

can see that the source is selected for being added to the chat and then right away the notebook guide pops up the notebook guide is an overview of the source so far and has a couple key features here so the first is that you can use the notebook guide to create any of these tools up above you can generate an FAQ based on my video called obsidian for beginners I can generate a study guide a table of contents a briefing dock a timeline so already that's a pretty powerful way to summarize sources and try to

identify links between different sources and also pull out the insights of the individual sources themselves there's also a summary of The Source I could imagine using this for a herberman video that's over 3 hours long I can ask my specific questions of notebook LM based on the video that hman would have uploaded so on the side here there's an audio overview and I will explain that in a little bit because that will make more sense once we've been chatting and then there are some suggested questions here the suggested questions are just quick starts on using

the chat feature which is here below for example this whole video is on obsidian for beginners nonlinear noet taking plugins and templates a logical first question would be what are the main benefits of using obsidian for nonlinear note taking so let's give that a go cool so it took about 15 seconds you can see that it answers the question with the heading at the top the answer is pretty good nonlinear note taking is beneficial because it better reflects how the brain actually thinks which allows you to revisit and use your notes more effectively all of

these are really apt and great points to derive from the YouTube video but now let's say I don't want to just look at obsidian for beginners I want to add in the other features from my tutorial Series so why don't we go and copy the rest of these videos into here okay so now we have four sources on the side here and I can go back and view my chat now it's very important to note that when you leave notebook LM your chat history will not be saved Google doesn't use your data for training but

that also means that they don't save it inside the notebook LM ecosystem if you want to keep your notes you have to save them specifically if you're interested in Saving the notes what you have to do is click save to note and it will generate a new note saved inside of your notebook here so we can get that new note a name obsidian beginner overview so now if I leave notebook LM and come back in if I go back to this chat the chat will have disappeared but this note will be saved inside of my

notebook that's just something to keep in mind when you're going through that if there is ever anything that feels valuable in the notes it's worth saving it because this is unlike chat GPT which keeps track of your conversation forever and if you're interested in adding your own note you can also create one here and then you can just write in it as if you were writing normally sometimes I use this to keep track of my prompts so I can copy this here add a note and just keep track on what prompts I'm using inside this

notebook so that at a glance I could go back and see all the questions that I've asked but now that I mentioned before we've uploaded these four sources why don't we use one of the built-in features let's create an FAQ by pressing FAQ button it automatically creates a new note and saves it so you don't have to worry about losing this in the future great so it already detected that obviously what I'm trying to figure out here is an obsidian FAQ so it has what is Obsidian and how does it work what is the digital

garden and how can I create one with obsidian honestly this is a really good overview of all four of my YouTube videos so what I could do is I could take this entire FAQ and I could add it as a Blog on my website or I could use it as a newsletter to give people just some really deep information that's well organized and summarized using notebook LM and all of that took about 10 seconds this is a great way to repurpose purpose your existing content all I had to do was drop in my YouTube videos

on the side here and then I could generate an FAQ overview so there's a couple other things I could generate a study guide could generate a briefing dock so the briefing dock goes through and identifies key themes across all of the YouTube videos and honestly again this looks like a really excellent overview it even talks about code which I go into depth in my YouTube videos it also includes some specific quotes so that's a cool idea because repurposing content I think is one of the key powers of notebook LM and here's a study guide I

could go and I could take in all of these YouTube videos and then ask a series of questions so if I was using this as part of a course for example I could automatically generate some questions for the course and then have an answer key that's also automatically generated now let's take a little bit of a deeper look at chat I've only used one of the automated questions before and honestly the questions are are pretty good on the bottom here so I recommend starting there and then expanding but I can also ask very specific questions

for example I could ask what the most common theme is throughout all four sources because maybe what I'm looking for is to work on my next YouTube video and I want to identify insights and see if the insights that notebook LM is generating are different than the ones that I've already thought about so I would say here enabling users to build a comprehensive personalized second brain or personal Knowledge Management System is the key theme of what I was going for so again this is a great summary so if I wanted to I could click save

to note give it a title and we're good to go let's say instead of using one of the default Creations in the notebook guide like the FAQ and the study guide The Briefing doc I could ask notebook LM to write an outline for a newsletter entry let's say this looks like a pretty decent overview of all the key Concepts and then I'll ask notebook LM to actually write the newsletter cultivating your digital garden with obsidian great title I actually have a separate segment in my newsletter called cultivating so that's kind of funny are you tired

of feeling overwhelmed by the constant influx of information if so you're not alone we're bombarded with more information in a single day than people in the 1500s consumed in a lifetime honestly this looks quite good it's a solid overview and I did limit notebook LM to a th000 words so I'm sure I could expand on it if I wanted to honestly the options are endless okay now that you understand a little bit about how notebook LM works I thought it would be a good time to compare it with the most commonly used chat interface chat

GPT notebook LM is private and does not use your data to train its models chat GPT does unless you turn on transparency mode but then you lose the entire conversation anyways notebook LM lets you intentionally curate your sources while chat GPT does not have access to sources this also means that you can verify the credibility of your sources in Notebook LM whereas chat GPT can hallucinate and make up information notebook LM can use real time information like today whereas chat gpt's cut off is I believe October 2023 which is kind of out a date notebook

LM has a massive context window 50 sources time 500,000 tokens is 25 million tokens in comparison chat GPT is limited to 128,000 tokens that means that I can put a ton of books into notebook LM and still have room left over whereas I might not even be able to include one book into chat GPT notebook LM lets you generate a podcast overview of all of your sources and notes whereas chat GPT only has the ability to have a text conversation or an audio conversation which is effectively just a text input that said if you try

them both and you find that chat GPT is performing better for certain types of questions or topics you can always have a conversation in chat GPT and then copy it into obsidian as a markdown file and add the markdown file to notebook LM as a source that way you get the best of both worlds there are so many different ways that you can use notebook LM you can have a different notebook for each topic each project each conversation where you've customized the sources for that particular Niche and then built up a micro AI system that

you can ask questions about augmenting your personal Knowledge Management System let's go create a new notebook so I can go back to notebook LM and this takes me to the overall area of my notebooks so you can kind of think of this as your library what I recommend is to create a new notebook for each topic or each project that you're working on for example let's say you've had meetings and you want to drop in audio files or transcripts from the meetings and then ask questions about it you might want to have a specific notebook

for meetings of that type so I could create a a journal system where I drop in my latest journals I could create another one for booknotes where I drop in all of the notes that I've been taking from different books so let don't me try that for a second these are all booknotes from my obsidian Vault let's say I wanted to make some connections between read write own psychology of money Bird by Bird play bigger building a second brain the innovators and let's just go with that so I can drag all of my book notes

in here all of them are uploaded as sources if you click on the notes you can see that each Source can be completely opened here so I have a list of all of my notes in here and it gives me a summary on the top it also includes all the topics and I have this for each book that I've included here so let's ask a question so it says the main theme is using the intersection of Arts and Sciences to improve Humanity different ways of how technology and creativity can be used to augment human capabilities

build community and ultimately solve problems so you can see that this is a pretty powerful tool I could take all of my reading notes for my University course and drop them all in here I can also drop in the books themselves and ask for specific insights to be derived based on my notes and how those notes compared to the quotes from the books themselves and then in each case there's a specific specific link to the particular note that I took so for example in read write own it draws to a specific portion on the three

errors of networks with this citation so not only can you see the themes be pulled through in the note itself but you can also go and specifically find where that Noe came from citations make it incredibly easy not only to identify key insights but also to pinpoint where that key Insight came from inside of the context of the source that way you can go back to the context and then build out from from there and also something that's worth noting is let's say for example Bird by bird didn't fit the notes that I was pulling

here and I was looking for something else I could just remove bird by bird as a source and that would remove it from the query in the chat bot below so you can always pick and choose between your different sources here and remember if you're interested in Saving the note it's worth saving it and let's try again write a blog of a thousand words tying all of these books together I mean honestly again this looks pretty good briding the gap between disciplines that's a key element of these books that I personally pulled from and also

keep in mind these are my notes on these books not the books themselves though with notebook lm's ridiculous context window you could definitely include all of these books in their entirety it just provides a really cool way for you to go and ask questions of either your notes or the books themselves so you can imagine putting in the whole book of the innovators which I believe is like 900 pages and then asking specific questions as it relates to an essay topic I'm working on for University or as it relates to my startup as it ties

in with psychology money and how I'm trying to improve my business it's really hard to overstate how powerful this tool is going to be for me and especially when combined with obsidian because I'm able to pull in all of my thoughts ideas and existing knowledge base my personal Knowledge Management System and then augment it with notebook LM so this newsletter seems pretty good I could save that and now let's take a look at the notebook guide the audio overview creates a podcast based on the sources that you've included in that notebook and the notes and

convers ation that you've had inside that notebook it's a really cool way to get a third party perspective on the sources and questions that you've been asking to give you different insight and perspective on what you've been looking for let's take a look and I can generate a deep dive conversation about all of these notes in here and my conversation that takes a few minutes so you can see that the podcast is ready to go it's about 16 minutes long and honestly this will probably blow your mind because it definitely blew my mind let's give

it a listen online communities can be such lifelines ESP especially for people who feel isolated or misunderstood in their offline lives for sure it's like finding your tribe your people in the vastness of the internet absolutely it's about finding your place in the digital landscape a space where you can be yourself right honestly I was blown away by the podcast feature the audio overview of the two AIS having a conversation with each other I use this for learning about Quantum Computing and the conversation between the two AIS really helped me understand the concept to a

much deeper level so I can go and download the audio file what's also cool is if I wanted to I could delete this and I could go add specific customization and then I can generate a new podcast based on that particular frame of reference let's hear what it sounds like welcome to the Deep dive today we're going to be exploring uh a pretty fascinating intersection I think where Tech and science kind of Meet the Arts okay and we're going to focus specifically on building sustainable systems for creation so I'll download this as 25 minutes and

I can listen to it later and rather than going back and reading through all of these notes on my books I can instead listen to a podcast that's been created that synthesizes all of the books together and potentially will start to give me some cool insights okay now that you've seen how notebook LM can be used in a few different ways for creation and Knowledge Management I thought that it'd be useful to go through a couple more example cases that I've found valuable if you find any of these interesting and you'd like to go deeper

into them please let me know in the comments and I'll make another video about it okay so as another example let's create a new notebook and I want to show you a research example okay so a little while ago I was doing some research on Executive function and the default mode Network I'm going to add a couple papers related to the default mode Network you see this is a pretty complicated paper it touches on a lot of Neuroscience so I want to simplify and then because this relates to the concept of finding flow let's add

that in there from my obsidian Vault too so let's drag in the finding flow note let's generate it briefing dock of these three sources to see how notebook LM thinks they tie together this is getting more into neuroscience and getting into some pretty complicated subject matter that I'm not an expert in but would love to learn more about Neuroscience flow and the default mode Network perfect okay so that's not bad but let's let's go a bit deeper let's ask the chatbot can you identify key themes between all the sources and then give a practical example

of the benefits of flow so again what's cool is I can see exactly where the information is coming from so it'll pull the specific location of the citation that's giving me the key themes uh let's take a look at the Practical flow example so I can tell that it's pulled in the specific elements of the finding flow book that I took in my notes so that's very good to know again I could just go through and keep diving deeper on any of these topics and keep adding more sources perhaps finding some long form Neuroscience YouTube

videos to drop in for additional context and I can create a new project for each one of these okay so as another example I just attended the Hinton lectures hosted by Jeffrey Hinton who's known as The Godfather of AI and I recorded the lectures so I have an audio file here and then I also had a conversation with my partner Taylor about it and she had a lot of good insight and I had a lot of good Insight in that conversation so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take all three of these

the lecture one lecture two and then the debrief that Taylor and I had I'm going to drop them in here this is a good example of how to use audio files because for me to go back and listen to this whole thing each of these lectures is an hour and a half long and my conversation with Taylor was about an hour long so that would be 4 hours to go back through and listen to all of these notes but instead I can drop them into notebook LM which will generate an automatic transcript and then provide

me with a chat interface that I can go and actually just ask questions about the lectures it automatically transcribed it it pulls the themes which is a really great way to identify the key elements of a note and then I can go to notebook guide it's not actually a conversation between Taylor and Jared uh and then I could generate a briefing dock of all the different notes and I can ask it question what is the biggest takeaway I should care about from these three sources most important takeaway is that AI systems can surprise us with

emergent Behavior such as persuasion manipulation and deception which canose significant risks for individual and society as a whole I would say That's The Core theme of what these lectures were about and it's honestly a really important thing to consider I could spent hours asking questions about my own notes that I made with conversation with Taylor and reference the original lectures themselves you could use a meeting for example or a lecture recording from University so you could use this at work where you're taking your meeting recording and then you ask it to generate emails or to-do

lists there's just again no end of what you could do with this type of system because you don't have to worry about any of the information being given to Google for training you can hold on to the confidentiality of the source materials themselves which is just such a powerful level up from something like chat GPT so let's go back to my tutorial video so I I have my four YouTube videos here and right now obviously I'm working on my notebook LM tutorial but I also want to tie notebook LM to obsidian because to me these

are two elements of personal Knowledge Management that AI really augments in a way that we haven't seen before because I'm able to take my second brain my obsidian Vault and add whatever files I want in here and then tie it to things like my newsletter and my YouTube videos I'm able to use my second brain in a different way without giving that data to to Google or open AI for training so why don't I go and take the notes that I'm currently using to make this tutorial drop it in here and then see what notebook

LM suggests me to include in this tutorial so let's go add a source choose a file and find my notebook LM tutorial notes so let's select that okay I just added that in here now I'm going to ask using my notes from The Notebook LM tutorial suggest an intro script a middle script and an outr script for a YouTube video based on a tutorial of notebook LM the scripts are for me to record is talking head to highlight the value of using notebook LM I can see here that is suggesting using the information overload commentary

which I think is a really valid reason to use notebook LM because notebook LM effectively helps you filter information a tool that helps you not just store information but actually work with it in a way that feels natural and intuitive cool so I will review this now so that I can make the best tutorial video for you as possible this is another instance of notebook LM I have I actually use this to create an obsidian data view query so what I did here is I pulled in all of the FAQs and all of the deep

information on how data view operates in obsidian which effectively is a type of code and I talk about this more in my other videos but data view is effectively a way to turn your obsidian notes into a database so by adding in all of the explanations on how to use data view I effectively created a tool that's a query Builder so that I can create lists and tables of my notes in whichever way I want to another way to think of notebook LM is that it's effectively a way where you can have little tools built

in and I built another one for audiogram extractions and YouTube scripting which I'll explain more in another video but the idea here is that I can go through and pull out all of my YouTube videos and then extract specific components of it using exact quotes and then use those quotes to create shorts that then promote the YouTube video this is something that I couldn't do in chat GPT because chaty PT wouldn't have access to my YouTube videos I'd have to drop in the transcripts themselves and it's just another couple steps again you can think of

this as your library and you can put whatever project or research idea you have anything that you want to Deep dive on you can go on the internet and you can just drag and drop any number of sources so for example I can go and I can pull all of my newsletters that I have talking about personal Knowledge Management let's see building a sustainable creation system creating income without burnout mental safety from AI anxiety augmented personal Knowledge Management and a couple more so now I have a few different newsletters here and what I could do

again is I could just create a new newsletter or create promotional material for social media and I can pull specific quotes and examples from my newsletter without having to go back through them all so not only is this a great way to do research and pull from the internet using other people's sources but I can also add my own sources and create a Content management system that allows me to easily repurpose my existing content content and for example I could generate a conversation that ties together all of these podcasts and then listen to it later

and use that to stimulate ideas and insight for my subsequent newsletter as another example if I was doing consulting I could create a new notebook for the particular client that I'm Consulting with and assuming they're aware of the fact that I'm recording the meetings I could record the conversations that we have and drop in any meeting notes and then create a briefing dock AO aut atically using notebook LM based on the conversation so that I have an idea at a glance of what the conversation was about and my next steps as another example I could

drop in newsletters upto-date breaking news information drop the YouTube videos in here and then have a real-time conversation as events are breaking with notebook LM using the source material that has just been released I could also create a new book that keeps track of my health along with the journal and well-being could have a specific one for my business on business strategy that updates as I get new data from either market research or profits and losses there's really no end to how you can use this software and there you have it notebook LM is an

incredible tool for augmenting your personal Knowledge Management helping you work with your information and knowledge a lot more efficiently and effectively the goal here is to not have ai replace you but to use AI to increase the quality while decreasing the amount of time it takes to generate and work with your knowledge remember remember to keep notebook lm's notes forever and not lose it when you exit the app you have to save your notes inside of notebook LM you can think of this as your short-term memory if you want to add it to your long-term

memory you can copy the note from notebook LM and add it to obsidian which functions as your long-term memory this is why obsidian and notebook LM are perfect for each other because notebook LM accepts markdown files and obsidian operates in markdown files if you're interested in learning how you can build up your personal Knowledge Management System in obsidian I have a whole tutorial series that goes into depth how you can use this as a really powerful tool for augmenting your knowledge I use obsidian every single day so I highly recommend checking it out another benefit

is that if Google changes their platform if they change how notebook LM works you still have a copy of the value that you got from notebook LM inside of your obsidian vault as part of local storage so you don't ever have to worry about losing it now I know this has been a lot of information so I'll talk more about obsidian and notebook LM in another video if you found this video helpful I would love if you would please consider liking and subscribing as your support really means a lot to me if you know of

someone that might find notebook L am valuable I would also love if you would consider sharing it with them as word of mouth is by far the best way for me to grow my channel so I really appreciate it thanks again for watching and I will see you in the next video