12 NotebookLM Epic Use Cases You Must Try

Notebook LM from Google is one of the most useful AI tools available today and is completely free to use. I wanted to show you 12 different Notebook LM use cases in this video that you could try right now, so we'll start with the basics and then finish up by combining Notebook LM with some other AI tools. We'll create a video podcast, give Notebook LM an AI avatar, and a whole lot more advanced features as we finish up the video.

This video is sponsored by HubSpot; more on that in a bit. Now, you could access Notebook LM at notebooklm. google, and they just got a big upgrade: it is now built with Gemini 2.

0. So when you jump into Notebook LM, here's the homepage. I'm going to start here by creating a new notebook.

Notebook LM is organized into different notebooks, and it'll bring you to this page. You always start with a source; your source could be different PDF documents, text documents, and there are some other things at the bottom that I'll show you in a second. Right now, let's just start with a note, and I'm going to start with an entire course transcript I have over here as a PDF document.

I'll upload this, and once you add that, right in the middle here, you could have a conversation with all your notes. You could ask for a one-sentence recap, and here's our one-sentence recap. It gives us little annotations on where you got that information from, which is directly from your own notes.

So that's use case number one—a very obvious use case. But I'm also going to add another source because with these notebooks, you could have many sources. Even though that document was a massive PDF, I could also add things directly from my Google Drve, from Google Docs, for example, which is going to be very useful.

If you look down here, the source limit is 50; you could have 50 different sources just in one notebook. So I'll insert a Google Doc over here titled "Seven Free AI Productivity Tools. " That's going to add it to this list of generative AI tools as well, and I'm going to show you a resource in a little bit that's going to give you a ton of different free prompts that you could use to interact with Notebook LM and other chatbots.

Let's get to number two. Now, tip number two is quickly repurposing this note into something like a study guide or even a useful outline. If you're writing a blog post or creating something educational, they have that right over here on the right side.

So let me show you the study guide option. I'm going to click on it, and it literally creates a new note. This is generating a new note using Gemini, so it generated an entire study guide for us, including a quiz, quiz answers, essay questions, and key terms—all in one click, which is extremely useful.

I used this for this very specific AI boot camp course that we just finished up. It went through that entire big document, the PDF, and the other doc that I added to it as well. You could also do the same thing and create a briefing doc; I'll show you what that looks like—very useful as well.

As you can see over here, this is more like a page or two worth of content from well over maybe 30 to 40 different pages of PDF and other documents that I've added. What's really nice about these is you could convert these to a source, and it will appear over here. Then you could actually have this as part of that notebook, and you could go into it and get a quick summary of the briefing.

So it's a really easy way to do that, and obviously, you could use the chat in the center to have any type of question and conversation with your notes. Now, for use case number three, let me create a new notebook, and this time I'm going to use a different source. So let's go to a website.

Down here, you could add a link. I'm going to go ahead and add a website link; I'm going to take this link from Wikipedia here. We'll go back to our notebook and paste it over here, and I'm going to insert that as a source.

Now, for this use case, I want to show you the "creating the timeline" option. Let me show you exactly what that does, specifically with this type of thing that's based on history or a certain period of time. Look at this really nice, easy-to-follow timeline from the very beginning of that article in 27 BC all the way up to 1453 AD.

You can even add a cast of characters from that time. I'm going to show you another AI tool that will now turn this into a graphic. This is called Napkin AI.

I just copied and pasted that entire text over here, and with all my text selected, I'm going to click this little icon. It literally is going to generate a graphic that you could put inside of any type of presentation, for example, or your website. Look at that; it just literally created this from the text I provided.

They have a ton of different styles and variations too, so you could scroll through and see which one makes the most sense for your presentation. If you like any of the styles, they also have different variations based on the type of presentation you're putting together. Now, the next use case is pretty new.

They added a way to use. . .

A YouTube link or multiple YouTube links as a source instead of a website. So, let me show you that next. I'll go to my own channel, look for Notebook LM here in the search bar, and here are a few different Notebook LM-related things.

I'm going to go ahead and copy the link from this video, and then we can use that as a source over here. Just like that, you are now able to have a conversation and ask any questions you want directly from a YouTube video. Now, the real power of this is not just having one YouTube video that you could have a conversation with, but you could actually add sources and include up to 50 different YouTube videos from all your favorite channels on the same topic inside of the same note.

You can mix and match it with different websites too. So, I'll use this link, for example, "AI Fundamentals," and it's a large list of different sources. I'll copy that over and we'll go ahead and paste that URL.

Now it's going to have everything from my video about Notebook LM; it's going to have all these things about AI Fundamentals as a source, and I can start asking it any questions over here and get it to repurpose any of this content for me in different ways. Now, if you want a better way to prompt Notebook LM and other AI chatbots, I got a resource from HubSpot that I wanted to share with you. That will save you a ton of time, especially when you're prompting chatbots like Notebook LM, but it works inside of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini—pretty much any AI-powered chatbot.

These prompts are extremely useful; they gave me a comprehensive list of over a thousand different prompts that will help you with productivity. These include different expert prompts that cover things like strategy, content creation, SEO, branding—pretty much everything you need if you're a marketer, entrepreneur, or creator. I've been personally using these prompts for a while now, and they save me a whole lot of time.

It's a 100% free resource, and I recommend you download the prompt from the link in the description below. Test it out with Notebook LM or any other ChatGPT conversations you're having, and it will save you a good amount of time in your day-to-day work. As you have a conversation with Notebook LM using your own notes as a source, it's going to give you responses.

The nice thing is you could always save these as a note over here, and it's going to save it on the right side that you can always refer back to. You could also press "add notes" and just type out your own notes manually. So, it's a really nice way to just use AI-powered note-taking with these prompts as well as having your own notes.

When you take your own notes, you can always convert them as a source too, and it will appear over here as your source. Now, the next one is the ability to create a notebook with your own voice notes. I tend to use my iPhone to record a lot of voice notes for myself, but I pretty much never organized them in a good, useful way—till now.

I could drop all those files right over here and then have a notebook that I could have a conversation with. I could use the prompt book to digest different things from my own notes. So, I open up the app on my phone; this is called the Voice Memo app if you have an iPhone.

Then, I could actually transfer all these into this source. I'll do that right now. I've added four different audio files, and typically, every time there's a new AI update and I find out about it, I leave myself a note.

So then, if I'm doing my newsletter, I could just recap that very quickly—all the new updates in AI. Okay, perfect! It talked about Sora, the new 01 pro model, the $200 a month reasoning model from ChatGPT, Google's new text-to-video generation platform, and then I could just go ahead and save this as my note right here.

It's going to save it over here, and I could send it to someone to write our newsletter for us. Now, the next one I wanted to show you is if you do any type of video conferencing, like Zoom calls or Microsoft Teams calls—which pretty much all of us do—you could create a notebook and then have conversations with that recording. The way you do that is just upload that conference call onto YouTube, but make sure it's unlisted so it can transcribe that video for you.

I'll show you some other transcription tools too, but this works a little bit easier. Here, I'll use this Gemini video as an example; it's 30 minutes. Then you just press share on it, copy the link, and inside of any notebook, you would go ahead and add that as a YouTube source.

Just like that, you could have an AI-powered conversation with any conference call. It went through a 30-minute video in just a few seconds and gave me all the cliff notes here that I need from that. It always gives you a source too, so you could jump directly into the source, and here's the full transcript that it automatically pulled in from YouTube.

Now, the next option I wanted to show you was analyzing an entire book using Notebook LM, and Google is particularly good at this because they have a large context window. So, your input on your prompt side, your sources could. .

. Be massive! So, what I could do is take this entire book, *A Tale of Two Cities*, and in this website right here, they have a version of it that is just plain text.

You could go ahead and download the plain text; in this case, they even give you a website URL. But you could also upload an entire book as a PDF too. I’m going to go ahead and create a notebook, and I’m going to, in this case, use a website.

But if you have it as a download, a text file, or a PDF, just drop it over here. You could always add it to Google Docs and add it through there too. In just a few seconds here, that entire book was digested in, and I’m going to click here to ask for a briefing dock.

I’ll just use one of these prompts here that is recommended, just to get some text down here too. It’s going to give us all these different reference points that we could click on, and it’s going to take us to that point in our book right here, which is super helpful. This is the briefing that I got: a very quick briefing of that entire book in literally just one click.

Now, let’s start combining Notebook LM power with some of my favorite AI apps. The next one I want to show you is translating anything you get out of Notebook LM into a different language. I’m going to take this briefing right here, copy that over, and I’m going to show you my favorite translator.

This is called DeL, and all you have to do is paste some text over here. In literally one second, it translated it from English to Chinese. I could click this to translate it to German, and literally, I could just copy and paste this translation from here.

I’m just showing you here in real time; it literally takes one click and, in one second later, you got a different translation. That brings us to one of the most powerful things you could do with Notebook LM, which is this thing called audio overview. I’m going to go ahead and click it; it’s based on whatever source you have set up over here.

What it’s going to do is generate a human-sounding podcast between two people. It’s very interesting when you listen to it. I’m going to actually play a few seconds for you as soon as it generates.

“Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today, we’re diving into Charles Dickens’s *A Tale of Two Cities*. You’ve sent over some excerpts, and I’m really curious to hear what you make of all this; you know, revolutionary France, mysteries, those classic Dickens characters.

” “Yeah, Dickens was a master storyteller, that’s for sure. ” “Yeah, and *A Tale of Two Cities* is really something special. ” Okay, how about that?

Look at this: this is 16 minutes and 42 seconds, and I could go ahead and press download. This is going to download that audio file for us. Okay, so that’s pretty cool!

But everyone that uses Notebook LM has access to those two voices right now. Every podcast is going to be that same two people or AIs reading that script for you. But what if you could change that?

Well, let me show you a couple of ways you could do that. I’m going to use an app called Descript. This is going to go ahead and transcribe the whole thing so we could isolate the two voices, and we have the entire transcription.

I could go ahead and identify the speakers here, and I could make any edits to this, by the way, using just a text file. So, if I want to remove something, I could go ahead and select any section like this and just delete it. Not only does it remove the text; it actually edits the audio, so then I could re-export the audio back out after I’m done editing it.

I wanted to show you Descript first, because it’s a great way to edit any type of audio without knowing how to edit. You literally edit the text that you don’t want. But because we have the transcription, that takes us to the next use case, which is changing the voices from the default Notebook LM voices.

So, I’ll take speaker number one, and inside of Eleven Labs, they have a text-to-speech function, so you could go ahead and create it this way. But they have a brand new thing that I wanted to show you; this is called Voice Studio. I’ll just go ahead and create one to show you exactly how it works.

This literally allows me to create a multitrack audio file. The text for the first speaker is going to go over here, but I could add another track, another voiceover track, and this one is going to become my second speaker as soon as I click over here. Then I’ll go back to Descript, and we’ll take speaker two’s line, which is right over here, and add that into this section.

Because I have the ability to edit that text script now, I could even clean it up as much as I want to in here, and I could generate the audio from here. It’s a little bit time-consuming but very powerful, right? Something you just weren’t capable of doing before.

“Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today, we’re diving into Charles Dickens’s *A Tale of Two Cities*. ” Okay, now let’s go to the second speaker, and you could edit this however you want, so you could just get them closer to overlap.

“Yeah, Dickens was a master storyteller, that’s for sure. ” How awesome is that! Now, you could actually have a unique-sounding podcast instead of the one everyone else is getting out of Notebook LM right now.

The next thing you could do is get Notebook LM to give you text prompts for video generation and create an entire video or even a little short film. So, what I did was ask it to create different text prompts for a text-to-video platform, and I requested 10 different shots that could summarize that entire book. Since Sora recently came out, I used Sora here to generate a bunch of different clips.

Then, you could use another platform like Suno, which will turn a text prompt into your background music. Here's a little preview of what that could look like [Music]. Now, the next one; we're really going to bring that AI podcaster to life, and I'm going to use 11 Labs to do that.

So, let me go ahead and show you a little preview. All right, you've really been digging into all this generative AI stuff, and it is a lot, right? It feels like it's changing everything every time you turn around.

It really is moving that fast! So, we're doing a deep dive today on your stack of transcripts. Absolutely!

And not just like the "what," but like what does this actually mean for you listening, right? So, first things first, before we even get to ChatGPT: I took the actual audio from Notebook LM, transcribed it, and gave it to Hey Jen. Hey Jen was able to clone me to replace the podcaster that Notebook LM made.

Then, I cut using CapCut, which is a video editor; I cut the female podcaster with myself. I created an entire video about exactly how I did that because that would be an entire video, and I want to show you a ton of different use cases with Notebook LM all in one video. So, I'll link that video here if you want to watch that.

Next, I've also been working on a complete Notebook LM course, and that's going to be ready next month. So, I'll put a link in the description to a waitlist, and I'll let you know via email when it's ready. In that course, I also cover Notebook LM Plus, which is the paid upgrade.

Thank you so much to HubSpot for sponsoring this video! Again, make sure you grab that prompt book they made available completely for free in the description of the video. Thanks so much for watching; I'll see you on the next one!