How to Use NotebookLM (Google's New AI Tool)

most of what we consider not taking and information management these days will disappear I'm talking organizing your notes gone formatting your notes no more searching your notes app and trying to find that one thing you know you saved but can't locate that is going to be gone forever it's a new platform that Google just released to the public called notebook LM in this video I'll show you what notebook LM is how it works and how you can get started using what I believe is the best soft ever created for leveraging AI in Creative [Music] work anything Google created in this Arena would already be interesting and worth investigating because it's Google they have some of our most valuable data some of the most powerful AI models such as the recently released Gemini which notebook LM uses and quite a track record for you know completely reshaping our relationship to information but there's another wrinkle one of the leaders and creators of the project is Steven Johnson multip multiple time best-selling author and the person who introduced me to tools for thought the general category that includes second brains Steven joined a team at Google labs to create a completely different kind of AI that we have not seen before and let me tell you it's the closest one yet to the vision of a true second brain I've been pursuing for years let's begin with a little getting started guide start by visiting notebook lm. goole.com and either creating account or you can sign in with one of your existing uh Gmail accounts sign up is limited to users in the US who are 18 years or older at the time that I'm filming this video once you're inside this is the interface you'll see everything in Notebook LM is organized in notebooks Each of which is like a single contained space for all the information related to a specific project such as a piece of writing you can create a new notebook by clicking this plus button right here and give it a title such as personal rization this was a online course that I took recently that I'd like to organize and distill some of my takeaways this is the main interface that you'll be using to interact with notebook LM and there's three main things to pay attention to the first one is the column on the left which is the sources column this is really the main feature that notebook LM has which is you can click that plus button and choose from different existing documents from which the AI will draw its knowledge and the three kinds of sources you can use are Google drive documents stored in your own account you can upload PDFs and you can copy and paste text directly from other places such as a not taking app for my example I'll use my Google Drive you can select up to 20 different documents in drive and each one of those documents can have up to 200,000 Words which means you can interact with up to 4 million words of text that's a far larger context window than any other AI tool out there I'll go ahead and select my notes on that personal orgaization class that I took recently and say insert and I want to show you what happens so first of all that Source appears here in the left if I click the source a couple things happen first of all the AI creates kind of a almost like a summary or an abstract of this source and these are some of the key topics and then if I want to actually see the full contents of the source I can just scroll down here I want to add a few more sources because the real power of notebook LM is not working with one Source it's working and drawing from multiple sources all at the same time and simultaneously so what I'm going to do is Click add source and add a few more drive documents and what I'm going to do is navigate to a folder where I have saved all the notes on every book and article I've read over the past few years later on in the video I'll show you how I was able to generate all of these documents and what I want to ask myself is what have I already read in the past and even taken notes on that might contribute to and be a useful resource in what I'm working on today so I'm just going to go through this list briefly and select any other documents that kind of strike me as potentially relevant here's one about what the world might look like in 201312 this is a good book here about the power of constraints climate change which is the topic of the course that I took even about what it might look like to terraform other planets such as in the science fiction book blue Mars some big picture perspective about our place in the universe designing for Behavior change because we may need to have a lot of behavior change when it comes to preparing for climate change I'm really just kind of noticing which books jump out at me as in some way related to the topic at hand so looks like I have 13 I'm going to go ahead and click insert all of the sources that I chose are now being added to the sidebar so let's talk about the two other spaces that you're going to be working with and now that we have all of our sources loaded up the main one is this little box down here which is really like other chat based AI tools such as chat GPT that we're used to you're basically going to have a conversation with the AI but drawing on the sources over there in the left so I could say something like create an outline of the main ideas related to personal preparation for climate change found in these sources hit enter you can see it takes a minute and there we go it's a hierarchical highly structured outline with main points and then supporting points or evidence or expanding on those points underneath each one and they're kind of in order from early things that you'll to think about to much later things this is just the first step there's a few different directions that we could go from here the first thing is I could ask it one of these suggested questions that you see down here you can see I can actually scroll right and left and what's interesting is they're based on this particular text so they're not just generic ones that appear the same way every time so things like what are the three main things to consider so let's say I just want something really Snappy really succinct I could click that it will ask that question and there you go it's kind of distilled it down to the three main things that I need to know what are some ways that individuals can prepare for and respond to both the personal and societal changes that are likely to occur as a result of climate change let's try that one as it's working behind the scenes I'm really having a conversation I can ask it to expand or to distill I can ask it to give me more information on one point but not others I can ask it to give me different formats like write this as a poem write it as a narrative write it as a question and answer FAQ format you can see in this case it's sort of adapted the content to really be focused on personal preparation which is the angle that I'm most interested in there's one more the third of the main three interfaces that you need to know about if you get a response let's say this one that you especially like you don't want to lose it this is a free flowing conversation so you might think well if I keep going and keep conversing I'm going to lose track of some of these great responses all you have to do is click this little pin icon and it's saved to this big space up here taking up the top of the screen you can think of this as a kind of pin board where you are pinning these kind of little cards with interesting information that the AI has given you just so that you keep them top of mind and easy to see and easy to reference one more cool detail here let's say in the midst of your work you realize oh there's another source I'd like to add you can always click right here where it says add note and either copy and paste from somewhere for example your note taking app or something that you found online or something from an email or you can just write directly into the note for example let's say I remember that the creator of that course that I took his name is Alex Stefan recently wrote a piece on substack that is much more recent and much more timely and I want to also incorporate that writing in that thinking into what I'm doing what I can do is head over to Evernote here is the excerpts from his article I'm going to do command a for select all I'm going to copy all that text and put it right into a new note and now what it will do is allow me to check this box right here and incorporate what I've just added right into the conversation that was a very basic tour of three of the main areas that you are going to need to pay attention to to use notebook LM effectively what Google has done is basically redesigned a notetaking app from scratch with modern AI in mind you still need to take notes but you can just kind of dump them into one giant pile and use the AI to sort through and make sense of them rather than having to meticulously organize things in files and folders notebook LM is different from other AI tools such as chat GPT because you can train it on a specific set of documents you know and trust that could be excerpts from books you saved notes you've taken in class highlights from articles or web pages or your own thoughts this is called Source grounded AI you point the AI at a specific set of documents effectively giving it instant expertise in whatever knowledge they can contain so you always know it's only drawing on authoritative private trusted information next I want to take a look at some of my favorite use cases that I've been using notebook lm4 sometimes I'm reading a difficult complex piece of writing such as a academic paper and I just need some help understanding it what you can do is upload a PDF of what you're reading this is a paper about the role of forgetting and learning I'm going to go ahead and select it and say what is the role of forgetting in learning so you can see here it's basically summarized what is quite a long technical paper into something that I can understand so I notice one of the points here which is that knowledge can sometimes have a negative value kind of piques my interest and the amazing thing about this conversational interface is I can now ask what are some examples of ways knowledge can have negative value that's kind of confusing to me so you can see here this is fantastic knowledge that's incorrect redundant knowledge harmful knowledge so imagine if I'm working on a project where I'm trying to convince let's say an IT administrator to not save every file that's ever been created across the entire organization that's something that I could ask it to do for me I could say please turn this information into a letter written to an IT admin arguing that we don't need to preserve every document ever created by the organization and there we go probably need some editing I'll definitely want to go through it and add my own touch but what's so neat about this is what you see right here which is the citations let's say I send this letter to the it admin and they want to know where did this come from what is the source what is the evidence what's the proof by clicking here I can see specifically where every piece of information or fact or argument in this conversation came from so for example let's click on number six here and not only does it show you you what is the original text that it's drawing from but over here on the left it will open up a window and highlight in purple that piece of text in context this is so important to have value citations need to be shown in context what was being argued before that up here what was being argued after that what is the holistic kind of situation in which this knowledge arose let's do another one which is meeting notes how often have you been a part of a meeting let's say a long meeting and you get the transcripts of everything that was said but they're so long and convoluted you don't really want to spend the time to read through all those even just the notes that you take yourself as part of a meeting that you're in this is a great use case for Notebook LM here is a Google doc which is the full transcription of a phone call that I had with a client of mine who's named duck and you can see it's very detailed very comprehensive as who is speaking when they spoke what they said so there's definitely value here but when I start to scroll you can see this is 26 full Pages a very detailed text I really don't want to spend the time to find the one or two facts or opinions or whatever it is I'm looking for from so much text so what I'm going to do is just copy the title of this Google doc go back to notebook LM I've created a new notebook here called meeting notes click add Source let's go back to Google Drive I'm going to paste it in the search just to make it easy to find there it is you can see one selected I'm going to hit insert what I can do now is essentially have a conversation with that document which if we look here has over 12,000 words it's much much bigger than can fit in chat GPT for example so what I'm going to ask is what are the main points of my conversation with Doug so you can see here Doug expressed interest in creating a training program what kind of training program well he believes a group Workshop would be most effective what does he want to incorporate into that Workshop elements of my course I mean this really just saved me 30 minutes to an hour at least so I could even go a step further please create a proposal for a group workshop training program for Doug's organization and there we go you can see it's written in the language of a proposal there's an introduction objectives target audience program structure features of the program benefits I mean this is really fantastic but I want to take this even one step further I want to actually add that right in why not just dump in the entire text of my book and allow the AI that I'm working with to draw on those details so I'm going to go ahead and click add Source right there I imagine one thing Doug will want to see is the full curriculum what is the full content that you plan on training them on so why don't I anticipate that and just say now please I don't know why I always say please when I talk to AIS create a full detailed curriculum drawing on my book building a second brain that covers the topics above for a full day group workshop and there we go you can see there's a target audience goals it has the morning session and what we're going to cover specifically introduction the four pillars fantastic sounds very familiar because I wrote that myself here's the afternoon session here's the closing session what's so cool about this is the reason I can feel completely comfortable uploading the full text of my book to this platform is the sources that you use in Notebook LM don't go anywhere else they're not used to train any model they don't get shared with anyone the second that I leave this notebook all of that will be wiped clean from the ai's short-term memory so those were probably half a dozen use cases that have to do with your day-to-day work reading understanding translating from one format to another but next I want to dive into a very specific use case that is very close to my heart heart and I know close to the heart of the people who created this which is writing especially writing that is creative or that is complex or multifaceted that is trying to simultaneously pull from many different kinds of really diverse sources while also synthesizing it into something that is your own creation that has your own style your own voice your own perspective the first writing use case I want to show you is using notebook LM almost like an editor so this is a piece of writing that I've done it's in draft mode and what I'm going to do is copy the title I've created a new notebook here called Mastermind insights I'm going to go ahead and add a source go to drive paste that in the search field there it is you can see one selected insert you can see if I click on the source it will show me what they call a source guide which includes a summary and key topics so let's exit out of that and what I'll ask is please suggest ways this piece could be improved so what's interesting is it's giving me lots of ideas but what I wanted to actually do is say please rewrite this piece in full following the instructions above it's funny it wrote it in a bullet point format so I'll ask please convert this from bullet point format into Pros now this is already probably better it's certainly much more succinct which I'm always trying to go for there's one more thing I can do here which is add a source go back to drive and let's see if I have any interesting sources on writing so this is one that jumps out at me immediately I can tell from the title it's a my notes on a book called Write useful books which is really about non-fiction prescriptive writing so I'm going to insert that and say please rewrite my article on takeaways from my first Mastermind drawing on advice found in right useful books it's interesting I'm curious looking at the citations which tell me some of the specific ways that it did that for example not using titles or headings that are clever or punny because that is interesting or entertaining but not useful is a great piece of advice for this kind of writing the next use case for writing I want to show you is really earlier in the ideation process let's say you're not even sure what you want to write in the first place you just kind of have some messy notes and you're looking for a collab Ator that can help you give them some meaning and some structure we'll go ahead and create a new notebook which is new article let's say I don't even know what it's going to be about going to go ahead and add a source go to drive let's go back to readwise which contains all the notes and all the books that I've read and what I'm going to do is pick one let's say that I've read recently such as a history of the index and what I'm going to ask it is please suggest related ideas or avenu of research related to this book so it's giving me ideas from indexing prehistory to Alternative indexing systems this book is about indexing the impact of digital indexing I mean each one of these is potentially a rabbit hole that I could run after the one that jumps out at me is historical Evolution and just seeing that reminds me that I have another book that I've taken notes on in the past which I believe was called glut there it is so let's add that in which is more about the past and about how our relationship to information has changed over time so now I have two sources I can ask please find connections or relationships between the ideas in these two books let's see if it found anything interesting so this is the one that strikes me I would like to write a piece about the democratization of knowledge how access to knowledge and ways of structuring knowledge has become more accessible over time so I'm going to say please suggest a few ideas for articles I could write about the democratization of knowledge through history and these all kind of strike me as somewhat generic what I think I would like to do is use a specific story use a specific example and what comes to mind I don't know why is a book I read about paleontology let's see if I can find it yeah it was called fossil men let's add that in here and now I'm going to say suggest the title of a of an article about the democratization of knowledge using an example from paleontology or fossils okay well that's an interesting title but I'm going to say expand on that title with an outline of key points this piece could contain interesting fossils in the history of Life fossils in human Origins so it's really going hard on this idea of fossils uh but kind of weaving together or weaving through it different ideas about democratizing knowledge this would obviously require more development I'd want to go in and look at the sources that it found maybe ask some of these follow-up questions let's say I'm satisfied with this initial outline for a piece I could even go so far as to say please write the opening lines of this article making them as a attention grabbing as possible like a a hidden world awaits a Chronicle of Life Frozen in time this is fantastic just notice what we've done we went from not even knowing what I wanted to write about really just a single source that I had been reading recently all the way to the opening lines of what sounds like a pretty interesting piece if you ask me through a completely conversational back and forth collaborative exercise with an artificial intelligence it's totally amazing now you may have noticed that what allowed this what made this possible was that I had all my notes and highlights from every book and article I've read over the past few years already in Google Drive but you can do that too and I want to show you how it's possible with a really powerful tool called readwise check out our in-depth video on how to use readwise for more information but what you can do is go to readwise which is a paid service and once you create an account and log in you can click dashboard here if you go to the import section you want to make sure that under the connected section right here you have your Kindle eBooks or your relater app or social media or whatever is the source that you want to be able to save in Google Drive which you can then use in Notebook LM so for me the two main ones are Kindle right here and readwise reader which I use to read online content let's head back to the dashboard and then the second thing to look at is under export you want to be sure that Google Docs is listed here under the connected section normally it will appear down here all you have to do is Click connect sign in to your Google Docs account the same account that you used to create the notebook LM account and then Google Docs will appear right here if you click into the Google Doc settings the key feature that you want to pay attention to is this third one right here if this is not checked then readwise will send all the excerpts from each source to its own individual Google doc so the excerpts that I saved from one book will go to one Google doc that makes it really easy to go through like you saw and select only the sources that you want to use in Notebook LM but if this is turned on what it will do is it will send all the highlights to one or maybe if you have many highlights just a few Google Docs so that you can fit it within that 20 notebook limit what that allows you to do is essentially have a conversation with your entire history of highlights from whatever sources you imported into readwise once you click here where it says start export to Google Docs you'll want to leave it running for probably a few hours depending on how many highlights you have but once it's finished you'll see a readwise folder appear in drive all right I know that was a lot I want to turn now to the other side of the story there's always another side which is some of the limitations and pitfalls this is an experimental brand new platform which means it's a little rough around the edges there are bugs they're having to invent a completely new interface which means there is a bit of a learning curve you have to figure out what the different buttons do and what the different parts of the window mean currently you have to provide the sources to notebook LM in the form of basically Google Docs or PDFs it doesn't have the ability to directly connect to a not taking app such as Evernote or notion or even Google keep you'd have to use something like readwise as an intermediary to get your notes into notebook LM you're limited to only 20 sources at most so if you have more sources than that that you want to use you're going to have to do some manual copying and pasting to get them under 20 just like a lot of other AI tools notebook LM has trouble doing math reading PDFs that have messy formatting and finding a lot of precise details if the sources that you're using are really large I've also talked to the notebook LM team and they said fixes and improvements to a lot of those issues are coming soon this is way more than a notetaking tool way more than a writing tool and it's way more than an organizational tool here's how I describe what notebook LM is trying to do until now the stages of the creative process like reading researching notetaking and writing were completely separate we had to use completely different tools for each step which means we were constantly having to switch between them and worry about things like formatting and compatibility and security and privacy no one software tool could do it all notebook LM gets all those steps and folds them into a single integrated space so you can remain in that wonderful Flow State and keep moving forward they call it working at the speed of thought it's an AI collaborator trained on the data Only You possess with your unique view of the world I suggest signing up for a free account at notebook lm. goole.com let me know what you think about notebook LM in the comments anything Google I have trouble saying the word Google how do you say that word Google Google go Google go Google I think it's more like goo like you say the goo first Google go how do you say that word Alex Google just like a normal person basically

Channel: Tiago Forte

Views: 564,802

Keywords: NotebookLM, Google AI Tool, Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte

Id: iWPjBwXy_Io

Length: 25min 49sec (1549 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2024