Make a podcast of any content - instantly

NotebookLM from Google is the AI research tool you never knew you needed

Do you have 2 minutes for me to make you smile from ear to ear? Want to hear two silver-tongued AI-generated, professional broadcasters hype you up more than your Mother at her knitting circle? Follow along and take a glimpse at the future:

1. Go to https://notebooklm.google.com/ and click on “New Notebook”

   

2. Click on “Website” and paste the URL of your LinkedIn Profile, it’ll look something like this: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheppardadam/ . Click the blue “Insert” button.

   

3. Your LinkedIn profile will be examined by GoogleLM. Click on “Notebook Guide” at the bottom right and then “Generate” in the Audio Overview section.

   

   After a couple of minutes of processing, what you’ll end up with is kind of mind blowing. A 3-5 minute broadcast quality discussion between two media-savvy podcast hosts ALL ABOUT YOU.

   You can check out a sample of my own below (fascinating. . .I know. . .)

   Adam Sheppard LinkedIn - HYPE!

   Tell me more

   So what did we just do? NotebookLM is an AI-powered research and note-taking tool powered by Google Gemini that aims to revolutionize how users interact with and process information. It's designed to be a virtual research assistant capable of analyzing, summarizing, and connecting information from various sources. Here’s the topline on what it can do and how you might think of it versus say ChatGPT or Claude.

   Key Features and Capabilities

• Source Integration: Users can upload up to 20 different files, including Google Docs, Google Slides, PDFs, and website URLs. Each file can contain up to 200,000 words, allowing for a substantial 4 million words of source material.

• AI-Powered Analysis: NotebookLM creates overviews of uploaded documents, summaries, key topics, and suggested questions to explore.

• Intelligent Q&A: Users can ask questions about their sources, and NotebookLM provides answers with inline citations, linking directly to relevant sections of the original documents.

• Note-Taking and Organization: The tool allows users to create, save, and organize notes. It can transform selected notes into outlines, table of contents, study guides, or summaries.

• Audio Overviews: NotebookLM can generate short, engaging "podcast style" audio from sources, simulating a conversation between two AI hosts.

• Collaboration Features: Notebooks can be shared with others, enabling collaborative research and learning.

• Large Context Window: NotebookLM can process up to 1 million tokens in a single interaction, enabling deep and comprehensive analysis.

Whether it’s a work research project, planning a trip, storing knowledge on a hobby you’re learning or more this is an elegant tool that goes beyond a simple chat interaction and starts to push into some novel user experience paradigms.

Some important notes. It bases its responses solely on the documents you provide, greatly reducing the risk of hallucinations or outdated information. The variety of modalities it can accept from text, to image and audio means you can throw pretty much anything at it. And your personal data is never used to train NotebookLM, ensuring confidentiality.

So beyond feeding your ego how might you use it in a business context?

📊 Financial Analysis and Reporting:

Upload earnings call transcripts, financial reports, and market research documents. Quickly summarize key points, identify trends, and generate audio overviews that simulate a conversation between financial experts discussing the findings.

🔍 Market Research and Competitive Analysis:

Aggregate information from various sources about competitors, industry trends, and customer feedback. Synthesize this information, providing insights and summaries that help in strategic decision-making.

💼 Sales and Customer Insights:

Upload interview transcripts, customer feedback, and sales data. NotebookLM can identify sales trends, common customer pain points, and help develop targeted coaching programs or sales strategies.

📝 Content Creation and Marketing:

Create your next local radio ad selling your product! Analyze industry reports, customer data, and competitor content. The tool can also help generate content ideas and outlines for blog posts or whitepapers.

⚖️ Legal Document Analysis:

Lawyers can use NotebookLM to analyze large volumes of legal documents, contracts, and case law. The tool can help identify critical clauses, summarize complex legal arguments, and provide quick overviews of lengthy papers.

🎓 Employee Training and Onboarding:

HR departments can create comprehensive training materials by uploading company policies, best practices, and industry standards. NotebookLM can generate summaries, FAQs, and even audio overviews to enhance the onboarding experience for new employees.

💡 Product Development and Innovation:

R&D teams can use NotebookLM to analyze patent documents, research papers, and customer feedback. The tool can help identify emerging trends, potential innovation opportunities, and synthesize complex technical information.

📈 Business Intelligence and Data Analysis:

Analysts can upload various data sources, reports, and industry analyses. Connecting dots between different data points, generating insights, and creating summaries that can inform strategic decisions.

🤝 Grant Writing and Non-Profit Management:

Non-profit organizations can use NotebookLM to streamline the grant proposal process by organizing information from various sources and identifying needs within underserved communities.

🎯 Executive Briefings and Board Presentations:

C-suite executives can use NotebookLM to quickly digest large amounts of information from various departments, creating concise summaries and key talking points for board meetings or investor presentations.

I’m excited to see how this evolves. If you get value from it, drop me a line. I’d love to hear how you’re using it.

Other Fun Stuff

Having grown up in England and living in Seattle you’d think the last thing I’d want is more rain. . . WRONG! I love our Summers here in the Pacific NW but I’m ready for the coziness of Fall drizzle. Of course there’s a subreddit for that https://www.reddit.com/r/raining/ where likeminded lunatics post some wonderful scenes of rain around the world.

This particular scene from Tokyo struck me as being especially serene, and given I don’t have much window access in my office I decided to make it my virtual Windows background.

You can grab the video using a Chrome Extension like “Live Stream Downloader”

And then use the free tool, “Lively Wallpaper” (minimal effect to your computers performance) to upload the video and set it to play with many settings like audio muting, playlist creation, etc. Obviously you can include any other videos you like from around the world. There’s also a version for MacOS at https://livelywallpaperdl.com/versions/mac/

Hopefully it’ll scratch your itch as we ease into the Fall / Autumn wherever you might be.

Thanks as always for subscribing. Please share if you know anyone who might find my musings helpful. If you’re looking for fractional help with your AI or Emerging Technology Strategy, or you have an exciting leadership role you’re looking to fill, I’d love to hear from you.