App Discovery: Google NotebookLM

Recently I started seeing a lot of mention of NotebookLM, so I decided to take a look, and it surprised me. 

You can access NotebookLM at https://notebooklm.google.com/ and it's free so far. 

What does it do? It's a summarizer, but it can act across multiple types of media. 

• Google Docs
• Google Slides (with a lot of text)
• PDF, Text and Markdown files (with a lot of text)
• Web URLs (with a lot of text)
• Copy-pasted text
• Youtube URLs of public videos (with captions)
• Audio files (with speech that can be transcribed by Google)

You're probably still confused as to how do you use this. Here's one possible example:

• You are trying to cram for an exam, and the professor made all the lecture notes available as a bunch of PDFs. 
• You load all the PDFs into NotebookLM as one notebook which you call (Subject) Cram 
• You can now generate a study guide of all the notes
• You can generate, then listen to a "podcast style" audio overview where a male and female host discuss the subject in an engaging manner. 
• Use the prompt window to ask Gemini to generate a quiz to test your knowledge of the subject. 

This is a VERY powerful tool due to its "multi-modal" ingestion. Previously, you can buy access to "book summaries", and some even have audio summaries available, but this basically lets you generate summaries on ANY subject, as well as have the AI generate quizzes, study guides, cheat sheets, and more to suit YOUR study style. 

Give it a try. You may wonder how you never heard of it until now.