A Complete How-To Guide to NotebookLM

Google describes NotebookLM as “your personalized AI research assistant powered by Google’s most capable model, Gemini 1.5 Pro”. But what does this mean? As someone interested in AI, it feels like every new tool is hailed as groundbreaking. So the question is, what is NotebookLM, and is it worth investing your time in?

In this article, I'll answer these questions by covering:

• What is NotebookLM?
• Key Features and Capabilities
• Getting Started with NotebookLM
• Key Capabilities in Practice
• NotebookLM Use Cases
• Who can use NotebookLM?

Let’s dig deeper into it.

What is NotebookLM?

NotebookLM is an advanced AI-powered tool developed by Google, designed to transform how users engage with and make sense of their information. By leveraging Google’s state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs), NotebookLM is a personalized collaborator, helping you analyze, synthesize, and create content from your uploaded sources.

Key Features and Capabilities

Here’s a list of NotebookLM key features. We’ll get into their details and practical applications further down this article

1. Versatile Document Import Options

NotebookLM supports a wide variety of source formats, making it flexible for any type of project:

• Google Drive files: Import Easily upload Docs, Slides, and Sheets. Changes in original files are not automatically updated, so manual syncing is required
• PDFs and text files: Process structured content or raw text directly
• Copied text: Paste excerpts or notes into a notebook for quick analysis
• Web URLs and YouTube videos: Paste a URL of a website or a YouTube video
• Audio files: Upload MP3 or WAV files, which are transcribed for interaction

I would recommend connecting your Drive to NotebookLM as it will allow you to share large numbers of documents easily.

2. Intelligent Content Creation and Refinement

NotebookLM helps you turn raw data into polished, usable content. It creates documents like timelines, FAQs, briefing docs, summaries, and even study guides. You can also create detailed audio files that discuss and analyze your uploaded materials in a new medium.

For example, you can use NotebookLM to synthesize diverse inputs like brainstorming notes, tabs of articles, and Google Docs into a unified slide deck reference. It’s a game-changer for organizing scattered ideas.

3. Interactive Collaboration

The real power of NotebookLM lies in its interactive nature. You can ask it direct questions or provide instructions to refine its responses. For example:

• Extract information from your notes: Upload meeting notes and request a summary of budget discussions for the next fiscal year.
• Improve your content: Share a draft blog post and ask for engaging titles or new angles.
• Solve creative problems: Ask NotebookLM to suggest compelling characters or plot twists for novel writing or world-building.

Citations from your uploaded sources back every answer NotebookLM provides. By clicking on these citations, you’re taken directly to the relevant passage.

4. Tailored Notes and Writing Tools

NotebookLM doubles as an advanced note-taking platform. Here’s what it offers:

• Pin useful AI-generated content to your notes for easy access.
• Save quotations or summaries directly from your documents.
• Use its intelligent suggestions to polish your writing style or structure.
• Combine multiple notes to create study guides or cohesive summaries.

For example, after an in-depth chat with NotebookLM, you can ask it to summarize the key points into a single note for future reference.

Getting Started with NotebookLM

How to Get Started

Like most Google products, getting started with NotebookLM is easy. Simply head to NotebookLM, and you’ll see a brief overview of how the product works. From here, you can either create a new notebook or explore a default example that has been created for you.

Creating a New Notebook

Let’s start by creating our own notebook. First, click “Create” or “New Notebook,” and you’ll see this screen.

From here, you can see all of the different upload methods we discussed earlier, as well as the maximum number of sources (50), which can be seen at the bottom. Please note that mine says 300 because I’ve paid for additional capacity, the default is 50.

I’ll create my first notebook by uploading a PDF from my computer. Once the processing is finished, you’ll see a brief summary of the uploaded source. As you can see below, a few actions will be suggested to help you interact with your document.

With this, you now have your first notebook!

Key Capabilities in Practice

Now that we have a notebook set up, let’s take a hands-on look at the standout features that make NotebookLM a powerhouse for organization, synthesis, and learning.

Audio Overviews

The most notable feature of NotebookLM is the Audio Overviews. These audio clips are basically podcast-style summaries of your uploaded sources. This feature caught my attention right away for its ability to turn complex documents into engaging audio discussions with a single click.

How it works: Once you upload a source, click the “Generate” button in the top-right corner. In a few minutes, NotebookLM will create a downloadable audio file where two AI hosts dive into the content.

Interactive mode: While this would be impressive on its own, there is a new “Interactive mode” that allows you to talk with the hosts of this podcast in real time to clarify points or direct the conversation. Yes, you heard that right. You can ask questions and interact with hosts to help direct the conversation. This is by far the most impressive AI feature that I use, and it's completely free.

For example, you might ask, “What’s the key takeaway from Chapter 3?” or “Can you explain the timeline in simpler terms?”

Customization: You can tailor these overviews to focus on specific topics or themes. Just click “Customize” and provide instructions for the hosts to follow, such as emphasizing key terms or excluding irrelevant details.

All audio overviews, whether you download them or not, will be saved within your notebook for future access. This goes for all documents that you create within NotebookLM.

Creating Study Guides

While my study guide days may be behind me, the ability to upload a file and create a comprehensive study guide still impresses me. Like the audio overviews, you can create a study guide with a single click. As the image below illustrates, these study guides are created directly from the uploaded source and are meant to help ensure your understanding of the content.

How it works: Upload a document and click the “Generate Study Guide” button. In seconds, NotebookLM creates a structured guide highlighting the most important concepts, questions, and key terms from your source.

Whether it’s for exams, presentations, or general understanding, this feature simplifies dense material into bite-sized, actionable insights.

Reduced Hallucinations

As many of you know, current AI models run the risk of fabricating answers in certain instances. These potential inaccuracies mean that we always need to be skeptical of AI responses. Google has helped address this issue within NotebookLM by grounding responses to your sources and giving direct citations.

This means that I can explore any responses that seem incorrect. This is a good time to mention that NotebookLM also has a built-in chatbot that allows us to chat with our sources. An example of this, and the citations, can be seen below.

Large Context Window

While NotebookLM’s numerous other features are impressive, they wouldn’t be nearly as useful without Google's huge Gemini 2.0 Flash context window of 2 million tokens. The large context window allows NotebookLM to handle vast amounts of information simultaneously. I can upload a 630-page PDF about Roman history and interact with it like a 10-page PDF. This feature also allows me to interact with multiple sources at once.

Multimodal Capabilities

NotebookLM has the ability to both take in and create multimodal content. This means I can upload text, PDFs, YouTube videos, or even audio files. For YouTube videos, NotebookLM extracts and analyzes the transcript. For audio files, it provides a transcription and can summarize key points.

For instance, if I upload a long YouTube lecture, NotebookLM can create a concise audio summary that covers the main points, a feature that saves hours of time and effort.

NotebookLM Use Cases

Obviously, a tool like NotebookLM has many potential use cases. While we can’t discuss them all here, I’ll try to share a few that interest me.

Education

Whether you are using NotebookLM to create a study guide for an upcoming exam or to help you understand an assigned reading simply, this tool has massive implications for learning. The base chatbot feature of NotebookLM also means that you can have in-depth conversations about your topic if that helps you learn. The same can be done by talking with the audio overviews to ask both general questions or for clarification on confusing topics.

Research

You could examine a larger number of research papers very quickly using NotebookLM. If you were looking for a specific topic, you simply have to upload these sources to a notebook and ask the model if any papers explain or mention a topic. Due to the search grounding and citation feature, you can also see a paper summary and decide if it would be beneficial to explore the article yourself. In other words, NotebookLM can be your first resource when interacting with academic papers or journals.

Meeting Notes

The ability to upload videos to NotebookLM means that you can quickly and easily create meeting notes. These notes can then be interacted with and built upon further by adding relevant context or additional meeting information. Now, instead of frantically scribing notes or writing abridged versions of the conversation, you can have all the details available.

Content Creation

One of my favorite use cases of AI is having a brainstorming partner. Bouncing ideas off an LLM can be a helpful first step in writing a paper, whether for school or work. The added bonus of using NotebookLM is that the responses will be grounded in sources of your choice, meaning you’ll have a lot more flexibility.

More Digestible Content

The ability to summarize complex topics into either written or audio content is something that helps me. When I’m trying to understand a new AI topic, for example, the ability to hear about it instead of reading a long, highly technical paper can be a great first step. It also means that content is more accessible. There are tons of great resources out there that we don’t investigate simply because of their format. Using NotebookLM, I can easily convert them to a more convenient format like short summaries, audio overviews, and more.

Who can use NotebookLM?

Given NotebookLM’s diverse applications, I’d say that everyone can find a use for this tool. Whether you're creating meeting notes, an audio overview of a long document, or need a study guide for an upcoming exam, NotebookLM has tools that will help maximize your time. Remember that NotebookLM is free to everyone! All you need is a Google account to start experimenting. That being said, they will be releasing a new NotebookLM Plus in early 2025. This paid tier will offer higher rate limits, increase the source limit per notebook, and allow for more customization.

Conclusion

While many good AI tools exist today, I’d only bestow the title of “great” to a few. NotebookLM is one of these few tools. Not only do the incredible features make this product stand apart from others in this space, but the speed of updates and advancements is a step above the rest. In a few short months, this tool has been taken from a novel but interesting idea to one of the most useful AI products on the market.