NotebookLM
Up until this morning, I didn’t know about NotebookLM. I was catching up on some of my YouTube subscriptions when I watched Matt Wolfe’s video ‘This Free AI Tool Can Do My Job (But It's So Useful!)’
In the video he shows how a rather dry PDF file about a Unified Model for Human-AI Alignment in Chess can be converted to a conversation held by two AI personas.
From a simple pdf the conversation was quite remarkable in its tone and banter between the personas. So I just had to try it myself.
The Holiday Vehicle Parks Pass
I went to the website at https://notebooklm.google/ and clicked on the “Try NotebookLM” button using my Google Account. As I was on the iPhone I didn’t have too many PDF examples and the first I came across was a Tasmanian Park Pass that I’d purchased last week during my holiday with friends.
The idea is that you put this on the dashboard of your car when you enter any of the National Parks in the region.
Here’s a screengrab of the PDF.
Audio Overview
So I selected the Park Pass PDF and loaded it into NotebookLM and selected Audio Overview.
Here’s some info supplied about the Audio Overviews.
Audio Overviews are lively “deep dive” discussions that summarize the key topics in your sources. This is an experimental feature and below are some notes to help you get started:
Audio Overviews (including the voices) are AI-generated, so there might be inaccuracies and audio glitches.
Audio Overviews are not a comprehensive or objective view of a topic, but simply a reflection of your sources.
Audio Overviews are only in English at this moment.
It can take several minutes to generate an Audio Overview (feel free to do other things while generation is in progress).
You need edit access to a notebook in order to generate or delete an Audio Overview.
You can share your feedback on an Audio Overview using the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons.
Then I hit the ‘Generate’ button and after a couple of minutes the overview was ready to be played.
Here’s a screengrab after the overview had been generated.
The Podcast
And for your listening pleasure here is the final Audio Overview. Love the comments re the number of passengers!
Explorations
I was watching a video, Put FACES to your NotebookLM AI Podcast audio! 2 methods!, from Bob Doyle Media about an AI platform called Hedra. He was showing how to take a Google NotebookLM AI-generated podcast to new levels of engagement by adding talking realistic faces to the podcast media!
So I thought I’d have a go. Unfortunately, without paying heaps of money I could only get 1 minute of video from a 5 minute podcast. So here it is.
I started looking around for an alternative platform that would give me a 5 minute option and ended up on D-iD. Not quite the level of Hedra but at least it allowed the full audio to be converted.
About NotebookLM
Here’s an overview of NotebookLM by Claude.ai:
NotebookLM is an AI-powered tool by Google for enhanced note-taking and research. It allows users to upload documents and now also podcast transcripts. The system interacts with this content to answer questions, generate summaries, and provide insights. For podcasts, it can analyze conversations, extract key points, and help users explore topics discussed. This feature extends NotebookLM's capabilities to audio content, making it useful for podcast researchers, journalists, and avid listeners who want to delve deeper into podcast material.
