35+ INSANE Ways To Use NotebookLM (For FREE)

So, this channel is all about sharing

with you the news stories and tools that

are grabbing my attention, swinging it

around, and refusing to let go. And

right now, Notebook LM is really front

of mind for me. In fact, here's a quick

anecdote that illustrates why I think

this tool deserves more attention. The

other day, I was messing around with it

on my computer and my son comes in and

asks, "Hey, Ank, what the Sigma are you

67ing right now?" And I said, "Well, my

dear boy, this is notebook LM. What you

want to know?" We had been talking about

the planet Saturn recently and wanted to

learn more. So, I plugged it into

Notebook LM and we proceeded to spend

the next couple of hours learning about

Saturn through a custommade podcast and

accompanying video. And this is just one

of the reasons why this tool is so

powerful. So, today I want to show you

everything you can do with it from top

to bottom and all for free. Starting

with a quick primer on what it is and

why it's actually useful. For starters,

you can find it over at

notebookm.google.com. google.com. Now,

Notebook LM does use Google's Gemini AI

models under the hood, but it uses it in

sort of a different way. It's much more

fine-tuned to focus on knowledge that

you give it. So, see all of these

articles on my left side of my screen?

These are all articles that I either

searched for and uploaded or copied and

pasted directly into Notebook LM. Now, I

can actually chat with it and it uses

this information to respond to my chat.

Now, if I ask it a question like, "How

many moons does Saturn have?" You can

see it gives us the answer 274 confirmed

moons. But more importantly, it actually

gives us the source of that information.

So, if I hover over these little numbers

here, it will actually tell you which of

these documents and where in the

documents it found that information. So,

if you think it might be hallucinating,

you can always doublech checkck the

source that it found that information

from. So, while hallucinations are still

a thing in Notebook LM, they happen way

less often because it's grounded in the

information that you gave it and because

it does its best to cite its sources,

making it a lot easier for you to

doublech checkck what it gave you,

ideally preventing hallucinations. One

particle of untitanium has a nuclear

reaction with a flux capacitor. Carry

the two, changing its atomic isoton into

a radioactive spider.

you science.

>> So for this video, let's go ahead and

create a new notebook and find out what

we can really really do with this thing.

So inside of notebook LM, I'll click new

notebook. As soon as you create a new

notebook, you'll get this add sources

screen where you can start to add

sources. If you accidentally close this,

it's real easy to bring it back up. Just

click the little add button under your

sources column here and it will bring it

back up where you can add more sources.

We can upload almost anything. You can

upload PDF files, text down files,

markdown files, even MP3 audio files.

You can connect it to Google Drive and

have it read various documents and

spreadsheets. You can give it links to

websites or YouTube videos and have it

actually watch or read the transcript

from the YouTube videos. Or you can

simply copy and paste text. If you don't

have specific PDFs or articles on the

topic you want to learn more about, no

big deal. You click on discover sources,

tell it what topic you want to learn

more about. In this case, let's say I

want to learn more about humanoid

robotics. I'll click submit, and it's

basically going to like do a Google

search for us, find a bunch of resources

about that topic, and then we can select

which of those resources we want to pull

in as our sources of information. A

complete guide to humanoid robots,

history of humanoid robots, we have a

PDF here, the mechanics, training a

whole body, ethics. All right, so this

looks like some good sources. I'll go

ahead and import these. and we'll notice

it populates our sources here in the

sidebar. It even skims our sources to

figure out what this notebook's about

and accurately said the landscape of

humanoid robotics. Every once in a

while, you'll have an article that you

can't actually inject to Notebook LM.

For example, I'm a subscriber to the

information, but it's a paywalled

website. So, if I was to take the URL to

this article, toss it inside of Notebook

LM as a source here. We can see that the

source is red. And if I hover over this,

it says the source is behind a payw

wall. So, it won't let me inject that.

So, the easy fix, click add, click

copied text, and I can simply copy and

paste this entire article from the

information in, and it will be one of

the sources that I can use inside of

Notebook LM. So, we'll just paste this

here. And now we have the whole article

inside with no issues. I'll remove this

as a source. And that's a nice little

workound. If you ever see a source that

for whatever reason Notebook LM doesn't

want to read, just copy and paste it.

I'm going to give it a prompt. what are

the bottlenecks for development of

humanoid robots? And we get our response

here that breaks down what it found from

within this information. However, if I

was to leave Notebook LM and come back

in, this entire response that Notebook

LM just gave me will be gone. It just

removes it. I would have to ask it again

and get a new response. If I really like

what it spit out here and I want to make

sure that I can read this again later, I

will have to click on this button that

says save to note. If I click save to

note, you can see over here it saved

this response as a note. So now I can

access it again in the future if I want

to. If we want to take this one step

further, we can even take this output

and turn this output into a source. If I

click on these three dots, I can convert

to source and it will now save this

response as one of the sources over on

my left hand side. Notebook LM can

handle up to 50 sources. So you can

upload or copy and paste or give URLs to

up to 50 different sources to use. And

each source can be up to 500,000 words

each. So that's 25 million words among

all of the documents that you load into

Notebook LM. One little tip, if you do

use all 50 of your sources and you need

to add even more content, well, you can

actually merge multiple documents into

one source if you want. So, I can take

this article and this article, create a

new document, paste both documents into

one source, and now those two articles

just became one source, freeing up more

space for me to add more sources. As

long as I stay below that 500,000 words

per source, you should be good. All

right, so that's the basic overview.

That's pretty much setting the

groundwork so you know exactly what

Notebook LM is, what it does, the

limitations, and the sort of basic main

use case. You give it a ton of sources.

you can chat with those sources. It's

not really searching the whole web or

trying to respond based on like what's

trained into a bigger large language

model. It's trying to respond based on

what it finds in the sources that you

gave it. But this again, just scratching

the surface. Let's dive into the really

cool stuff you can do with Notebook LM.

A couple videos ago, I tested Sora 2

compared to VO3.1 to see which is the

better AI video model. And to be honest,

both of them still had a few issues. But

apparently I spoke too soon because

there's actually a third new AI video

model that just dropped today. This one

is by Litrix and their new LTX2 video

model can apparently generate native 4K

videos at 50 frames per second for up to

15 seconds. So let's test it out. So

here's a prompt that I have a feeling

both models might have trouble with.

Feel free to go ahead and pause the

video to read the whole prompt. I'm

worried about that mirror reflection

part cuz that's an area that often can

go wrong. Here's what Sora 2 made. And

yeah, that gets wonky pretty quick. And

now here's what LTX2 made. Honestly,

this looks super realistic. And it

followed my prompt to a T. And this

isn't just upscaled footage pretending

to be 4K. LTX2 is actually generating

native 4K at 50 frames per second. So,

if you zoom in, you can really see just

how detailed this video is. This is a

great tool for creators or studios. But

if you want to go deeper into the

technical side, the API access can be

requested through the LTX2 site and is

being rolled out gradually to early

partners and teams. So if you want to

see the difference for yourself, check

it all out at the link in the

description. Thanks so much to Lightrix

for sponsoring this portion of today's

video. Now, let's get back to it. One of

the most basic use cases is for sort of

focused information retrieval. One thing

I've seen people do, and I've started

doing this myself, is to upload various

user manuals for products you have, like

I have nice camera equipment, nice

microphone equipment, I've got a stream

deck, I've got a mixing board sitting

next to me, I've got all of this cool

tech equipment, and well, I can throw

all of these manuals into Notebook LM

and then ask questions when I run into

problems. So, for example, my camera

keeps focusing on my background instead

of me. What should I do? My camera is a

Sony FX3. So, it is most likely reading

this document to learn about how to

adjust things on my camera. And sure

enough, it gave me a whole bunch of

things to try. It's also a great place

to consolidate all your documents on a

specific project. So, let's say I was

making a video about quantum computing

and I did some interviews with people

based on quantum computing. I can pull

in those transcripts and those

conversations. I could pull in articles

I found about quantum computing. I could

pull in my own notes that I wrote up

about quantum computing. Any sort of

resources that are linked to this

project or this video that I'm creating,

I can throw into a notebook inside of

Notebook LM and query that information

however I want, as well as do a bunch of

cool repurposing and content creation

directly inside of Notebook LM, which is

something else we'll get to in a few

minutes here. If you run a business, you

can upload all of your training

documents, all of your SOPs, all of your

support documentation for your product,

put it all into one place, and then you

can actually share access to that

notebook to team members that work in

your company. And now team members no

longer need to go to you to ask

questions. They could go to the notebook

that has everything they could possibly

need in there. And it will respond based

on your SOPs, your product documents,

and anything else you put in there. It's

a great resource to help onboard new

team members into your company because

they can chat with pretty much the

collective knowledge of your company. It

can create timelines for you. So, using

my quantum computing example, create a

timeline of all the important events in

quantum computing. And it gave us a nice

little breakdown of everything that's

happened in quantum computing. And

here's another cool little tip. This is

something I totally stole from my friend

Tina Hong, but I thought this was a cool

idea, so I'm going to share it here as

well. But if you were to copy the

response from this whole note and jump

into something like Google Gemini, you

could turn this timeline into an

interactive visual timeline. Create an

interactive visual timeline using the

dates below. And then I will paste in

our entire timeline that we just grabbed

from our other response here. Ship that

off to Google. And here's what it

created. Not my favorite interactive

timeline, but you know, it's a start. A

few more prompts back and forth and we

would have something pretty solid. I

imagine it can understand the contents

of images as well. So here's this

infographic from the prob blogger

website and you can see it's a very

information dense infographic. If I was

to take this entire image here let's go

ahead and save it. We'll create a new

notebook here. Now we can take that

infographic and unfortunately we can't

upload images directly but we can

convert that image into a PDF and have

it read it based on the PDF. So I'll

just open this image here on my

computer. export as a PDF. We'll toss it

into Notebook LM here. And we can see it

knows exactly what that image is all

about. I can give it a prompt, give me a

step-by-step guide on how to go viral.

And based on our infographic here, it's

given me a step-by-step guide. No need

to squint and try to understand what's

going on on that graphic. Not only is it

great for productivity and knowledge

management, but it's also amazing for

students who really want to learn

anything. As we've already kind of

touched on with our quantum computing

and Saturn, but let's go even deeper. If

we really, really want to understand a

topic inside of Notebook LM, we can

create things like flashcards and

quizzes to really really lock in the

information. If I click into reports

here, I can also generate study guides,

technology primers, concept explainers,

or even click create your own and make

like an FAQ. So, let's generate flashc

cards. Let's generate a quiz. Let's

generate a study guide and let's

generate a mind map. Our flash cards are

ready. So I can click on this and we get

a new box with some flash cards. What is

the fundamental purpose of quantum

computing error correction? I don't

exactly know how to respond to this to

reduce errors. I would suppose to

protect quantum states from unwanted

environmental interactions, decoherence,

and other forms of noise. I don't know

much about quantum computing. So yeah,

in QEC a quantum error correcting code

is a subspace within a larger

mathematical space known as a I don't

know Qbit. Nope, not even close. But

yeah, you can do flashc cards. We've

also got a quiz which I will do equally

as bad on. What fundamental principle of

quantum mechanics allows a cubit to

exist in a combination of both zero and

one states simultaneously? I think

that's superp position. Yeah, I got one

right. but it generated 15 questions for

our quiz so that I can actually test my

knowledge on quantum computing. If

you're in school right now, Notebook LM

is probably going to be your favorite

tool/study guide ever. Here's the study

guide that it generated for us. Now,

this is more just for reading. It gives

us a short quiz with an answer key here.

It gives us some essay questions,

glossery of terms, and pretty much what

we would need to know to kind of

understand the basics of quantum

computing. It also generates mind maps

for us. So we got our quantum computing

and error correction mind map here. And

this is really handy to dive deeper and

deeper and sort of understand subsets of

topics within the quantum computing

niche. So foundational concepts and

components. I can click this little

arrow and expand on this topic. And now

we expanded to cubits, quantum phenomena

exploited, quantum information

processing. And I can dive deeper into

this one specifically and then deeper

into this one. And you guys know how

mind maps work, but you can go deeper

and deeper on a topic in the form of a

mind map if that's something that helps

you understand and grasp the topic even

better. Now, I'm also a big journaler as

well. I journal almost daily on just

random thoughts, and just get things out

of my brain. That's where some of my

ideas come from, video ideas, problem

solving ideas, things like that. Most of

it comes from journaling for me. And I

actually really love putting all of my

journal entries into Notebook LM and

then having conversations with my

journal or generating audio video

overviews or mind maps or things like

that about my journal entries. I find it

really therapeutic to have like an audio

overview that's discussing my thoughts

or to look at a mind map. It's almost

like a mapping of my brain and the way I

think, right? My mind map really kind of

shows where my thoughts lie. Business

and brand strategy, personal habits and

self-management, delegation and saying

no, events and travel, creative insights

and philosophies. And I can just dive

deeper and deeper, right? New venture

projects, newsletter growth, future tool

strategy, YouTube channel improvement,

current focuses, and it's like my brain

and thoughts in like a visual mapped out

mind map. And it's just kind of crazy to

dive deeper and deeper into this. To me,

like I find it really valuable. it might

help highlight some blind spots that you

didn't even realize you had. But another

thing I like doing is because this does

actually accept audio files, MP3 files,

sometimes I'll just turn on my

microphone on my phone and just record

audio into the notes app and just brain

dump my thoughts in audio form and then

you can upload them into here and gain

insights from your thoughts and have

discussions with your thoughts. To me,

that's really valuable. I found it to be

really helpful personally. Now, this

Notebook LM account that I've been

playing with so far is actually on my

business Google account. If I was to

switch over to a personal Google

account, like one that's connected to my

normal Gmail, there's actually another

resource for education, which is public

notebooks that other people have shared.

Now, again, you only see this if you're

on a personal Google account, not a

business account. But I can click in

here, click see all, and see some of the

recent featured shared notebooks that

expert curators have created. So, for

example, parenting advice for the

digital age. If I click in here, they

curated a whole bunch of sources around

this topic and already pre-made a

podcast, an FAQ, a mind map, and gave

some sample questions that you can ask

that they saved the results on. So, not

only can you create your own notebook

and search it and understand topics on

what you're interested in, but you can

go and find notebooks that other people

have created and sort of continue down

the rabbit hole that they started. But

now I want to talk to content creators

because there is so much opportunity

with Notebook LM if you're a content

creator because it can do things like

audio and video overviews. These are my

two favorite features and I haven't even

talked about them yet. An audio overview

essentially creates a podcast with two

hosts talking to each other about the

topic that you gave information on. So

if I click into audio overview here we

have a few options. We can have a deep

dive podcast created, a brief podcast, a

critique or a debate about this topic.

And you can even steer it a little bit.

So I can tell it to really focus in on

just the rings of Saturn and how those

were formed and get it to make a podcast

specifically dialed in on that topic. We

can also choose a length of shorter,

default, or longer. And you can choose a

language that you want the podcast

outputed in. So I already created a deep

dive here about Saturn. This is one that

I created with my son a couple days ago

and it sounds just like a podcast. Check

this out.

>> Welcome to the deep dive. We cut through

the noise to get you the clearest

science insights. Today, uh we're

strapping in for a trip to Saturn.

>> Yeah, Saturn. Visually, it's just

stunning, isn't it? Those rings are well

iconic.

>> Totally. The biggest, brightest rings

out there. but uh scientifically.

>> And one really cool thing that they've

recently added to these audio overviews

is the ability to interject in the

conversation and ask additional

questions. So, we can see here that as I

press play, there is this little

interactive button here. Let's click on

that. Now, we can play our podcast and

listen to it normally, but there's also

a join button. So, check this out.

>> Welcome to the deep dive. We cut through

the noise to get you the clearest

science.

>> Oh, wait. Someone wants to join. Hey, go

for it.

>> What are Saturn's rings actually made

out of? Oh, that is a fantastic

question.

>> Welcome in. We love it when you chime

in.

>> That's actually the perfect starting

point for our discussion today about the

ring's age paradox.

>> So, you can see that I can click this

join button and as they're having their

podcast, I can jump in and ask a

clarifying question or maybe a question

that they didn't cover. It's like this

interactive podcast that I could join in

on, which I think is really, really

cool. But I can also download the audio

overview that it created and listen to

it offline or even upload it to Spotify

or iTunes and create a full podcast

around it. But even newer than their

audio overviews is the new video

overview feature. It actually uses

Google's Vids technology which sort of

makes like PowerPoint slide presentation

style videos. If I click on video

overviews here, we actually have a

handful of options. We've got an

explainer video or a brief, a bite-sized

overview to help you quickly grasp the

core concepts. Once again, you can

choose languages and you can steer it in

the direction you want it to go. But

they've also added some new visual

styles like this classic style, more of

a whiteboard style, a watercolor style,

a retro paint style, heritage paper

craft, and even an anime style for it to

generate your explanation video in. I've

never seen it do one in anime style. So,

let's have it generate another video in

anime style. But while we're waiting for

that, here's the previous video overview

that it generated. You ever have one of

those days that just seems to drag on

forever? Or maybe it flies by? Well, it

turns out for the planet Saturn that

might literally be true. Today, we're

going to crack open a real cosmic

mystery. A puzzle that had scientists

scratching their heads for decades. All

right, I'm going to scroll through the

video a little bit so you can see that

the slides actually do change as they're

explaining things in the video. How long

is a day on Saturn? And then it gives

some explanation of how the amount of

time a day is is actually changing. And

there's visuals to go along with like

everything they're saying in this video.

And when you're done, you can actually

download the whole video as an MP4 file

and use it however you use videos. And

here's what the anime version of the

video looks like. The voice over is

pretty much the same. So, let's just

take a look at the visuals here. So,

it's a slightly different style, and you

have a few options to choose from, and

they all look pretty good. I mean, it's

not using VO, so it's not like animated

videos, but it's making slides for your

entire presentation. But I really love

this ability to create podcasts and

video overviews and things like that by

just giving it information. In fact,

some people have created entire podcasts

that they put on Spotify and Apple and

those places just using podcasts made

from Notebook LM. For example, Andre

Carpathy, one of the original founders

over at OpenAI, created a podcast called

Histories of Mysteries. And if you take

a listen, it'll sound pretty familiar

>> on this planet. You're telling me we can

actually learn something about this

ancient ancestor?

>> You'd be surprised what we can piece.

Now, I don't know how many people are

listening to this podcast, but it's got

48 reviews and a 4.4 stars. And the

comments on the side, all two of them

are both positive. But you can see right

here in the bottom of the description

for this podcast, it says, "Audio is AI

generated by Google's Notebook LM.

Images were made by Ideogram." So, we

have a full ongoing podcast entirely

generated by Notebook LM here. Now, from

a content creator standpoint, think

about all of the repurposing potential.

If you have a product that can make

podcasts for you, make videos for you,

create documents for you, and do all of

the other stuff that we just created,

there's pretty much infinite

possibilities for turning one piece of

content that maybe you create originally

into multiple other pieces of content.

So, let's quickly kind of go through the

list. And I know I'm not going to cover

everything here, but let's see. You can

feed it a video and turn that video,

like a YouTube video, into a written

blog post. You can turn that video into

an audio podcast. Let's say you're

starting from a podcast. You can turn

that audio podcast into a written blog

post. You can turn that audio podcast

into a video. You can turn that podcast

into a second podcast where AI is

commenting on your original podcast. You

can feed it audio notes of you just

rambling. Turn that into a blog post.

Turn that into a video, turn that into a

podcast. You can convert written blog

posts into videos, convert written blog

posts into audio podcasts, and you can

convert everything that I just mentioned

above into social media posts for

whatever social media platform. So give

it a blog post, give it a podcast, give

it a video, give it a audio note of you

rambling and then tell it to turn it

into a LinkedIn post, a Facebook post,

an ex post, a threads post, a mind map

that you can screenshot and share on

Instagram. I mean just in repurposing

from one style of content to another

alone, I've just fed you like almost 20

ideas. I mean 19 ideas for just

repurposing from one style of content to

another. And again, I feel like these

are fairly obvious use cases of Notebook

LM. There's some use cases out there

that are completely wild and outside the

box. And if you have ideas like that, I

hope you leave them in the comments so

that people that are watching this video

can skim the comments and find even more

ideas and creative ways to use Notebook

LM because there are a ton. Before we

wrap up, I want to give a few quick tips

and reminders to help you get the most

out of Notebook LM. First off, don't

forget that if it gives you an output

that you like and you want to remember

that output, it's not saving it to any

sort of history. There's no history of

your chat here. You need to save it to a

note if you want to be able to refind

this message. When you are adding

sources, I highly recommend feeding it

different types of media. Give it

videos, give it blog posts, give it

audio, give it PDFs, copy and paste

stuff from other sources, and just feed

it as much as you can to get the best

results out of it. Another quick tip is

see how there's check boxes next to

every single note here if we don't want

it to reference a specific article. We

can uncheck that specific article and it

will ignore that article when you ask it

questions or you can unselect all of

them and have it just look at one

article at a time if you want. So you

can really tailor what information the

chat is grounding itself with by

checking or unchecking sources on the

lefth hand side. Four, you can actually

add your own notes. So, if you're

reading something and there's something

you want to remember, but you don't want

to save this entire text, you just want

to save something simple. Over on the

right, you can click add note, and it'll

just give you a little text editor where

you can add your own note here. We'll

call it my note. And now we've got a

simple, easy to access note here that

maybe you keep your own little side

notes on. And these notes over here

aren't going to be something they factor

into the output of the chat unless you

click the three dots and convert it to a

source. and then it becomes a source

that's part of what you're chatting

with. So, if you've ever wanted like a

personal knowledge base where you can

have separate folders for separate

topics that are interesting to you and

then just chat with that one topic, that

one subject, that one area of interest,

this is for you. It's also great for

uploading your own thoughts and ideas

and then creating podcasts or having

discussions with like your past self,

the past thoughts that you had. To me,

that's really fun and interesting and

helps me sort of unlock a little bit

about how my brain works. So, so many

creative use cases and I really feel

like this is an underrated,

underutilized, undertalked about AI

tool. Everybody's talking about chat GPT

and Sora and Claude Code and all of

these cool tools. But in my opinion,

Notebook LM is one of the most useful AI

tools, platforms, whatever you want to

call it, available today. It is an

educational resource and guide for

anything you want to learn. It's a way

to better understand yourself. It's a

way to repurpose and create new content

out of content you've already created

and so much more. I am absolutely in

love with Notebook LM and just wanted to

share all of the ways I use it because

it is so dang powerful. And if you like

videos like this and you want to stay

looped in with the latest AI news, but

also get details, tutorials, and tips on

how to best use and integrate all of

this AI that's coming out into your own

life or business, make sure you like

this video and subscribe to this

channel. I will make sure that more

videos like this show up in your YouTube

feed, and you will always be looped in

and tapped in and able to integrate all

of the newest technology into your own

workflows. That's my promise. If you

follow this channel, I'll do my best to

fulfill on that promise. Thank you again

for tuning into this video. I really,

really appreciate you. Thanks for

hanging out. Thanks for nerding out.

Hopefully, I'll see you in the next one.

Bye-bye. Thank you so much for nerding

out with me today. If you like videos

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