NotebookLM - Hits and A Short Wish List
If you’ve been following Tech &Nonsense for a while, you may have seen that I like using Google’s NotebookLM. It’s a bit of an outlier in this era of new generative AI tools. It’s not a chatbot and it can’t create an image of a Black Labrador in Gladiator gear discovering where all the food is stored in the Coliseum.
It does a very good job as a notebook though - a notebook with plenty of room for lots of sub notebooks. I have 23 notebooks in it right now, and the largest one has 20 sources. I’ve been using it often enough and long enough now to offer up my take on its hits, misses, and a few personal wish list items for it - which looks like this:
Hits
Getting to know NotebookLM and using it is simple and fast. With minimal clicks/taps you can create a new notebook, add sources to it, and start on interacting with the sources.
Generating briefing documents, FAQs, table of contents notes about each notebook is also very fast. Getting answers to questions/prompts is even faster. When you ask questions in a notebook, the responses have links to which places within sources address your question.
NotebookLM source links popups The web app’s user interface isn’t beautiful (can we say that about any Google UI?) but it’s basic enough to navigate easily - with columns for Sources, Chat (choose one of the suggested questions or ask your own), and Studio (where the notes you have it create live and its Audio Overview live).
It can generate an Audio Overview of one of your notebooks or a selected source/s within a notebook. This feature on its own brought a lot of attention and love to NotebookLM.
More than anything I think NotebookLM can become something like a mini digital version of an old school library, with some cool new features. A library where it’s easy to add new “books” in just a click or two and then come back to dive into them whenever the mood strikes or there’s a need for information from them.
My NotebookLM Wish List
As nice as NotebookLM is, I have a few things I’d like to see improved or added to it. These are:
Search across notebooks. This can’t currently be done. I can try organizing my notebooks better, creating narrow and broad focused notebooks for example, but it would still be better to have have this feature.
The Audio Overviews should be more responsive to customization prompts. I cannot find a way so far to get a short clip from it - even when specifying a maximum number of minutes. When I ask for three minutes, it gives me 14 minutes or more.
I also find that once the sort of novelty value of the audio overviews has worn off, they’re a little generic. They are good at touching on the central themes and ideas within a notebook, but they’re a little too much like a recital of those.
I’d like to see more options for exporting notes from NotebookLM. Google Docs is handy for me, but not for everyone.
Last but not least, although the NotebookLM web app on a phone is pretty good, it would be far nicer to have a native mobile app for it.
Are any of you using NotebookLM? If so, what do you like best about it, use it for the most? Do you have any wish list items for it?
I’ve started using it recently, and it’s immensely helpful. Agreed on better Docs integration (Slides and Sheets would be great as well).
I should give it another go. I was very into for a bit and listened to a podcast of the guy who was part of the research team who developed it. Author - think he's on substack? I'd have to go back through my ... notes heh heh. Anyhow he had compiled this insane list of references for his writing and that was one of his primary use cases in developing it