Ultimate NotebookLM Guide (Google's AI Note-Taking App)

are you looking to maximize your notetaking in 2025 well you've got to try Google notebook LM and in today's video I'm going to show you everything that you need to know about it how to get started and five amazing examples of how you can use it in your daily routine notebook LM is one of the most powerful AI notetaking tools right now and Google seemingly continue to invest in it as a way for you to take your notes to the next level today I wanted to show you how you can get started and how you

can use it in five different ways to boost your daily productivity and to save you a bunch of time this guide will be the comprehensive resource for you to go out there and start taking advantage of notebook LM and using it in your routine so welcome my name is Franchesco if you're new to the channel do subscribe to tool finder and jump over to Tool finder.org guide which you can find below to maximize your productivity using artificial intelligence like this so all you need for Notebook LM to get started is a Google account now you

can have whatever account you want in my case I'm using a workspace account but you can access it on pretty much anything and there are actually two packages to Google notebook LM now and that is a regular package which gives you access to all of the features but there's also an additional package which is called plus you need Google Gemini for this so I'll include some more details about that that gives you more access more abilities and also is much faster apparently to be able to use so good that Google's investing in this product so

for those getting started let's create a notebook now this is what appears when you're getting started and it's very much adding the sources the sources are like the fuel for using this so you can add a few different type of sources you can add PDFs mark down an audio in any format and you can also add things that are part of your Google account like a Google Docs or a Google Slides a website or YouTube video or even some copied text you get a limit of 50 sources which is pretty good and if you want

to add more you can add them by pressing up here and minimize them if you want them to go away now this Central Area here is actually your where you actually communicate with your sources so this is incredibly helpful cuz this is where all of the recommendations are going to come through and as you add your sources it's going to be even more helpful and over in here the thing that you may have seen on social media is the audio overview where you can generate a podcast with two AI hosts instantly and it allows you

not only to generate it but to customize it and give it some prompts which we'll explore a little bit later now down here anything you want to add you can create a note these notes are really simple and and you can convert them to a source at any given point if they become even more valuable as you use them now in the studio you will also be able to use a study guide which turns all of the sources and your notes so far into a study guide which turned into a note down here as well

as an FAQ a timeline and a briefing document which are all incredibly useful resources to getting started now you can share your notebook at any given time using the copy link up in the top right hand corner and there's a settings area as well to change the light and dark mode if you feel that takes you fancy so now we've got the basics out of the way you can rename stuff and edit the title but let me show you my first example the first example is journal and feelings now you may want to reflect on

your feelings every single day so here's a great way to do it now sometimes ENT entering uh information can be obviously private information so just make sure your comfortable sharing that information before you do but I copied in five pieces of text that were generated from a journal that I generated through chat GPT that essentially were journal entries for 4 days now what's interesting as well is you can use the source guide here and it instantly breaks down those emotions and key topics that are part of the source so that's incredible already so that's really

useful because if you would just upload a source and you weren't aware of all of the the information from it you could analyze each Source before you even jump in which is incredibly helpful so in this case the journal entry indicated that there was tension between fear of the unknown and anticipation for growth that's something I might not have been able to understand fully from my own note which was a journal there's also key topics as well which it extracts out now you can also do this for any of the other sources you got in

this case I've only done pasted text but you could export your entire job Journal as a markdown and upload up to 50 sources as part of that now you can see here that the chat is dramatically changed let me minimize the sources for a second you can see here now based on all of the four sources those four days that I journaled it indicates that there were mixed feelings of sadness optimism nervousness so this is a really good one there was a way to really quickly get a summary for it so what you can do

here is save that note and as I said those notes appear here and they also get a title in instantaneously so that's helpful for getting a summary of everything but you can also start communicating with this uh you could say what are some of the ways I can combat these feelings and it's going to pull from all four of those sources to generate an answer based on it now that answer as you can see it's been broken down and references sources as part of that so for example it gives me my first recommendation now of

course this is not going to be your assistant just FYI in terms of being an actual therapist so it could be something that you dig deeper on or you actually combine with other things but as you can see it says aidatech emotions and gives you some recommended advice it also gives you five pieces of recommended advice which you can use uh as part of that now you can use as a study guide here so the study guide is essentially a way to turn those notes into an actionable table of contents that potentially is valuable to

you so let's see what they generated for that as you can see it gives you a quiz as well so for example this might not be valuable as a study guide but just as an overview and a feature demonstration we'll probably show you that with the fasting stuff you can see what specific concern about the future is mentioned in journal entry 1 so probably not useful me so anytime you can delete your notes and the notes will not be stored as part of this down here which is really helpful now as you can imagine all

of those sources those notes that you create as part of it can be converted into a source instantly so if you're taking active notes to improve your active use of this it then converts it to into source which is incredibly valuable adding even more perspective to for you to go deeper and deeper now one of the things that you can do is generate the audio overview now for a journal entry this could be incredibly useful because having two people reflect on your thoughts could be an incredible you know today we're doing something kind of different

we're diving deep into well your world oh intriguing right we've got these journal entries chronicling your lead up to a big career change last days coming up fast I see following someone through this huge life transition that reflective activity for somebody that's maybe struggling with their feelings or emotions could be an incredibly valuable EX exercise so looking at this as a journal it can not only be a great way to chat with your emotions and get actionable advice but also to start taking some notes about how you feel even potentially using notes in here as

a way to bring in your Daily Journal and having those chats to unpack your feelings and emotion now of course you can add as many sources as you want you could say you could turn a source into pasted text that is week one week two week three and add up to 50 sources almost a whole year of journaling inside of notebook LM so that could be a really interesting perspective CU you would be able to keep it inside of one notebook and that could be incredibly useful so again another perspective on using this so one

of the next things that you could do is use this as a resumé summary now for example I took my LinkedIn profile turned it into a PDF by just going print save as and a PDF and I essentially uploaded it and I as you can see you can start to see um a breakdown of that it summarized it but what I might ask is um what potential career moves are coming up for Franchesco and this could be a great way not only to turn your resume into a useful breakdown but it could also be a

way for you to analyze your entire history for example it says it says expanding his content creation consultancy and marketing partnership with SAS companies speaking and it starts to pick out some really useful stuff now you can also begin to uh use the podcast as a way to reflect on how you present yourself online so if you're looking to improve your online profile you could upload your Twitter account your LinkedIn and start to begin to pull together a all right let's jump into another deep dive this time we're focusing on Franchesco so I'm going to

hit interactive mode and this interactive mode will allow me to listen to the podcast all right let's jump all right let's jump into another Deep dive this time we're focusing on Francesco delesio he's this Pro oh hey I think our listeners got something to say so I'd like to uh say that I'm Francesco and I'm looking to better improve my profile so could you give me a few ways for me to you want some specific tips for your LinkedIn profile right absolutely and we can totally help with that what's fascinating is that your profile is

a dynamic resume so we can look at it with that lens yeah it's all about telling a story not just listing things absolutely if you think about your tool finder role you can highlight how you help people choose tools making it a story about problem solving you know yeah and you've got a ton of endorsements that back up your claims so make those very visible for sure those social now one of the other pledges in my life is formula one now one of the things that you might want to do before travel or a lifestyle

activity or learning a new skill is to embrace some of the knowledge that you've got coming up but combining two things together so for example let's say hypothetically I want to travel to Monza which is the Italian Grand Prix and I want to teach myself Italian that is relevant to the racetrack so in this case I've uploaded a YouTube video called the Italian Grand Prix travel guide as well as a full teach yourself beginner Italian PDF which I found online so as you can see what it's doing here is giving me recommended device based on

my situation and referencing it as well as part of this so for example it says when greeting staff it is appropriate to use bonjo until about 400 p.m. and then you would use bonacera and then you can start to see for example if you have a ticket sayto and then it gives you more advice surround ing things that you would typically interact around the track for example it could be like the RAC is called lagara so you might want to overhear that for example F2 so that you knew that there's an F2 race coming up

or something like that but you get the idea this can be incredibly helpful as a way to learn but you can also customize the audio overview I asked it to focus on basic phrases about how to speak to locals about the race so what it's going to do is regenerate the podcast based on my objective here to look like I'm speaking Italian to the locals that are at the track waiting for that I also created a briefing guide and what this did really nicely is not only summarize YouTube video which outlines everything about the track

but it combined it with the knowledge of the for example the the learning Italian and also from the internet so for example in this case the start finish straight for example it's telling me you know that the grand stands are split sinista and Destra so if I'm looking at signs I can look that this is going to be the sinistra grandstand I don't know whether they Str up like that and the Destra which is the grandstand to the right so this can be an incredibly helpful setup when it comes to combining language and a travel

so one of the obvious things as well is study and research and one of the things that you could do is upload multiple sources like Mark down documents and things from websites YouTube videos and PDFs and I've done that with some fasting research and one of the things you can do is use this as a study guide so for example in this case studying can become a lot more interactive and you can not only use the audio and interactive mode that's are in beta to interject into the conversation asking questions that spiral into your head

at that given time you can also use it as a study guide the study guide is a really helpful way to quiz yourself on specifics so for example here you could ask something like what are some of the potential benefits at intermittent fasting mentioned in the John Hopkin source and then if you scroll down you can find the answer which is linked below so this is a really incredibly useful guide to starting to ask questions and you could also start chatting with the resource to better get some insights from that but this is a really

nice combination for those who are studying to really get a better idea of how to take advantage of their notes and use their notes in active learning hey everyone so I get it intermittent fasting is like everywhere these days right you're probably thinking okay is this just another diet fad or is there something real to this well look hey there want to share your thoughts on this is it actually a diet F at the moment is there any data to prove that more and more people are doing it that's a great question and it's totally

valid to wonder if this is just a fad yeah it's important to approach these things with a healthy dose of skepticism I think so while our sources don't really get into the popularity of intermittent fasting is a trend right they focus more on the science of it all they do show there's a renewed interest in fasting practices though we can definitely see that across different cultures right definitely there's been a lot of books and online resources popping up on the subject it's not oh yeah uh-huh what references to other cultures are there with fasting oh

that's a fantastic question I'm glad you asked about the cultural aspect yeah that's a great point to explore it helps us see that fasting isn't just a Modern Trend our sources actually touch on several cultural and religious practices involving fasting one of the most prominent examples is Ramadan one of the examples that could be really helpful is actually taking your business knowledge and improving it so for example I've uploaded the current process that we do for a very basic uh onboarding process to a new employee now it's pretty awful in how we set things up

so maybe you want to improve it and change it I've also found a YouTube video that essentially outlines how you can pre onboard people but also manage a buddy system the insights are incredibly useful in that so I'm going to take these two and ask it can you upgrade our current process of onboarding to a new one with the recommendations of the video and what you can see here is one that it generated earlier it started introducing an entire step-by-step guide in how I can turn everything that I learned through the YouTube video into the

current process and I didn't even have to watch the Youtube video this is incredibly useful resource because it's pulling from a set specific source that you can use to improve your team oh there is so those are five examples that you can use with notebook LM it's a powerful note-taking experience and it's only going to get better and the more you use it the more powerful it will become so you can check out notebook LM and hopefully this guide gave you everything you need to know about it if you're searching for AI tools and resources

I'd recommend jumping over to tool.co the best place for you to find tools on the line thank you so much for stopping by please do make sure to subscribe and I'll see you in a future video Cheerio for now