New Tool Cuts Research Time, Creates Podcasts

Whether you’re a student, teacher, businessperson or volunteer, you know the time it takes to gather, organize and understand many sources when conducting research.

There are videos, PDFs, websites, personal notes, audio, slides and more you must digest and blend before creating clear arguments, class plans, articles or whatever you need.

Now, Google offers a free online, experimental tool called NotebookLM that does all that and more, saving you lots of time.

The program is powered by advanced artificial intelligence. It lets you load into online notebooks up to 50 sources, such as Google Docs and Slides, PDFs, YouTube videos, web page addresses (URLs), and text. According to Google, there is a 500,000-word limit per source but no page limit, and the program supports over 35 languages.

Once you upload the sources, NotebookLM lets you view summaries of each source or all of them combined, creating citations, so you know exactly where it gets its information. You can also generate FAQs, study guides, and tables of contents, ask questions about the material through a Chat feature, and more.

One of its most impressive capabilities is creating professional-sounding “deep dive” podcasts that distill your research and use two hosts–an AI-generated male and female voice–to discuss its findings.

I conducted a test to spotlight that capability. I loaded into a Notebook the URLs of thirteen Suffield Observer articles about Suffield’s sustainability efforts during the last year. Then, I asked NotebookLM to create a podcast based on the articles. The exercise took about 15 to 20 minutes. Click here to hear it. It’s truly amazing.

According to Google, NotebookLM’s summaries and Chat answers should be reasonably accurate since they’re based on sources you load. Of course, they also include any biases or mistakes the articles may contain. Currently, you can’t correct those mistakes. In contrast, other AI engines like ChatGPT base answers on massive amounts of text and can be more prone to errors.

Some experts criticize NotebookLM summaries as being too general and reliant on analogies that aren’t always appropriate. Yet, others say that the summaries can provide a good basic understanding of complicated topics, such as dense legal cases and scientific studies. Just don’t expect perfection. It’s an evolving technology.

Find out for yourself. Start experimenting today. All you need is a Google account to sign into NotebookLM. It’s free, at least for now.