Google NotebookLM is a great tool for adding AI to your notes

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GoogleLM notebookIt is a new free service that allows you to apply artificial intelligence to your notes and documents. You can use it to brainstorm new ideas and find new connections in your ideas and research. Read on to learn how to use it, what I like most about it, its limitations, and two interesting alternatives.

How to start usingLM notebook

• Sign up forNotebooklm.google.com. It’s free at the moment, while it’s in beta.
• Load up to 50 documents into a collection (or “notebook”) of resources to explore.
• You can create up to 100 of these notebooks for different topics.
• Each document you add can be up to 100MB in size and contain up to 500,000 words.
• You canAddPDF files, Google Docs, or pasted text.
• Inside each notebook there is a “notebook” space to save AI responses and key passages from your sources or to save ideas as you interact with the AI.
• When you create your account, you’ll see some sample notebooks you can explore. Explore these notes and try the queries to learn how they work.

advice:Consider separating your writing from the research you have gathered from others. This will make it easier to differentiate the sources of your material later.

Example: I have a collection on entrepreneurship journalism, for example, with a variety of notes and materials I’ve created over time. I am building another book focusing on the history of classical music, with articles, research, and notes I collect from others. Having separate spaces for these elements will help the AI ​​break down its analysis, and will also help me ensure clarity about sources.

What to use NotebookLM for

Analyze your materials

Once you create a collection, NotebookLM creates a summary of each document in it. It also adds topic tags based on the content. You can then query a specific document, a group of documents, or the entire notebook. This is useful if you want to analyze material from a particular source or a set of documents on a particular topic.

Suggested queries

NotebookLM will suggest some queries you can start with, based on its analysis of your materials. For example, in my collection of Entrepreneurial Journalism Notes, I proposed inquiries into best practices for pitching startups.

This was suggested because I’ve written extensively about presentation methods in the documents I’ve uploaded. When I clicked this query, NotebookLM extracted a variety of material in my notes and created a summary of some of the key points.

To help me locate the source material in this summary, NotebookLM has provided a list of 10 citations from the nine documents I uploaded. I can then click on the citations to view those original source sections. I can also add this summary to my notebook as a new note. This is useful when developing something new.

Ask your own questions

NotebookLM also allows you to ask any question you want. For example, I queried my entrepreneurial journalism notes about past discussions about podcast revenue streams.

Responses from AI-powered chat services like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini can be difficult to trace back to any particular source. (Confusion, The most useful AI search serviceshares useful citations.) With NotebookLM, by contrast, you can leverage artificial intelligence applied specifically and narrowly to analyze your own note, with citations.

• Judicial notice: Sometimes I find the decisions NotebookLM makes about which source sections to cite puzzling.

Build on your notes

After you query NotebookLM, you can save its answers and build on them to take new notes. These items are on your notebook, along with other AI queries and new notes you take. If you’re writing something new or preparing a presentation, you can use NotebookLM to help you explore your material. You can have a dialogue with your notes. This is one of the most valuable aspects of NotebookLM: it goes beyond just keyword searching.

Determinants

• As of May 2024, NotebookLM is only available in the United States to people 18 or older. Some Google accounts may not be able to access. I can use it with my personal Gmail account, for example, but not with my work account.
• There’s no mobile app, although the mobile web version works well for simple queries.
• The design still looks a bit dated to me. The interface includes multiple panels — one for your source documents and one for your queries, along with various notes you save or create. Since this is a new type of tool, it may take some time for a simplified view to emerge.
• Google does not train its models on the material you provide, which remains your own. But if you are skeptical about the company, you may not want to upload private materials.

Alternatives

• M It is an AI-powered notes app that trains itself on your notes. Related notes are automatically displayed as you type. You can also ask questions about your own notes, just like NotebookLM. But Mem is a more functional notes tool. I wrote about him Why Mem is like the next generation of EvernoteYou can’t break down its AI analysis for specific notes or notebooks the same way you can with NotebookLM. Mem only works with Google Authentication, so you need a Google Account to use it. Pricing: $100 per year or $15.
• AnythingLLM It is a free software tool that you can download to run an AI model on your laptop. You can feed it any notes, documents, or files you want to apply AI to. You can also run the form completely offline, so you don’t have to upload files to a cloud server. I tested this to apply AI to a completely private set of files on my laptop. It’s surprisingly easy to set up and use. I expected to spend an hour following the instructions, but it ran in about 15 minutes on my 2021 MacBook Pro. I even played it offline. AnythingLLM works on Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops. I downloaded and ran the open source Llama 3 sample, which requires about 4.7GB of space.

This article is republished with permission fromWonder Toolsa newsletter that helps you discover the most useful websites and applications.Subscribe here.