What is NotebookLM?
NotebookLM is an AI tool from Google that lets you create notebooks and then research your project, refine using chat, and choose from a range of outputs. For this example, I am showing my Publishing Notebook in NotebookLM. I created my Publishing notebook to research self-publishing for my upcoming fantasy and science fiction novels I am writing. You can join my author list here to get notices when the books are ready.
When you first log into NotebookLM, you will see a list of your notebooks and an option to create a notebook, Click on [Create New] to create your first notebook.
After you have created a notebook, you will see a screen that consists of three panels: Sources, Chats, and Studio.
Sources:
The Sources panel lets you add sources by searching the web (Fast or Deep Research), uploading files, adding from Google Drive, and copying and pasting text. You can then click on each source for an AI summary and remove it if it doesn’t fit your project. This lets you pick and choose from the best sources on the web, plus any of your own sources, such as your own books, reports, SOPs, and research you have already done. For example, in my publishing notebook, I also included subreddits related to authors and publishing. I can even upload my own book manuscript to help determine the best target audiences and marketing channels for it.
Chat:
The Chat area is very similar to what we are already used to with other AI tools. I use the chat panel to ask my questions and make connections between with my data sources and accomplish the tasks I want to achieve.
Studio:
The Studio panel in NotebookLM is brilliant. This lets you take the sources and your chat conversations and turn them into something that can actually be used! Here are the options.
- Audio Overview: This function’s name is really understated. You can choose an audio overview as a:
- Brief – a short audio overview of the core ideas
- Deep Dive – NotebookLM creates a conversation between two podcast hosts, talking about the topic
- Critique – an expert review of your sources
- Debate – a debate between two hosts
- Options: You can also choose if you want a short or long audio overview, the language and you can specify what the AI hosts should focus on. I was blown away by the audio options created here
- Slide Deck: This option will let you create a slide deck. You have options of a detailed deck or presenter slides (clean and minimal to be presented by a speaker) and again you can choose language and give slide deck instructions. You can run the slide deck right from within NotebookLM to present it, or share the notebook and slides with others and also export as .pdf or PowerPoint (.pptx). I use this feature to create slide decks when I present.
- Video Overview: As someone who regularly creates video content, the Video Overview blew me away! The video overview lets you create a short Brief for you to quickly learn core ideas, or you can create a structured Explainer video. You can also choose from a range of different visual styles and specify what the AI should focus on. The result? A beautiful explainer video with an excellent AI voiceover.
- Mind Map: As someone who loves mind maps for brainstorming and training, I was pleased to see that the Studio output options included the ability to output the knowledge content as a mind map. The mind map is animated, moving as you open or close each branch. The mind map can be downloaded as an image (.png) file for sharing.
- Reports: Report options include creating a briefing document, a study guide, a blog post or a custom report where you specify the structure and style. They also have a few format templates for you to choose from. The reports are in a mainly text version that can also include tables. You can copy and paste the text with formatting into other word processing options to expand and edit the report.
NotebookLM Advantages Over Other AI Tools
Ok, you are probably already using other AI tools. Me too. I regularly use Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Gamma. So why would I also add NotebookLM to my AI toolkit? Because NotebookLM does some things that other AI tools don’t do or don’t do as easily or as well.
Source Control: I like that NotebookLM lets me control what sources it uses and I can tick or untick sources quickly to change the inputs. Yes, this can also be done with careful prompting, but NotebookLM has source control built into it’s interface so it is easier to use.
Reduced AI Hallucinations: Like us, AI has been known to have flights of fancy and just make up information, as some lawyers have found to their chagrin when they go to court and find their AI has made up case law precedents! By more tightly controlling the sources, AI hallucinations are reduced.
Studio Output Options: This is where NotebookLM really stands out from the pack. The ability to create audio reviews, podcasts, explainer videos, slide decks, mind maps, reports, and tables is something no other AI tool does at this level.
Google Workspace integration: Because NotebookLM is part of Google, it is tightly integrated with the Google ecosystem such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. Also the Google AI paid memberships give you not only upgraded access to NotebookLM, but also to Google’s other AI tools like Gemini, Flow, Jules, Antigravity. So you are getting several upgraded AI tools for the price of one. In addition, the upgraded Google AI memberships give you additional storage in your Google Workspace, excellent for those of us pushing the limits on Google Drive and Gmail.
NotebookLM Drawbacks
Of course, as with any tool, there are some drawbacks. Here are a few areas where we hope NotebookLM improves in future.
Slow Creation Times: While the output in the Studio is amazing, it does take some time to create each studio item. So I usually hit the create button and then go work on something else for a bit and come back.
Slide Deck: While the slide decks come out lovely, they can’t easily be edited. You can’t just add a single slide or edit directly within slides like you do with Gamma. Editing is only done by going to each slide, suggesting changes in the chat box for each slide, then generating a revised deck.
MindMaps: The mind maps can’t be edited or exported to other mind map formats, only downloaded as an image (.png) file
Note Taking: NotebookLM lacks common note taking app features like creating new notes (have to paste text or use Google Drive), bi-directional linking or the ability to access information across multiple notebooks. This makes it difficult to use as a primary note-taking tool.
Graphic Creation: While NotebookLM is great at creating infographics, it is not great at creating other graphics, so I use Gemini and Nano Banana for other graphics.
Cross-Notebook Information Retrieval: You cannot automatically put in information across multiple notebooks, instead you would have to add the sources manually.
Notebook Organization: There is no folder, or subfolder system, so as your number of notebooks grow, especially if you have hundreds of notebooks over time, it can be hard to find the one you want.
NotebookLM Use Cases for Business
And now for the focus of this article, exploring NotebookLM use cases that actually help you in your work or business. Here are the broad categories where I have found NotebookLM useful so far:
- Content Creation
- Customer Support
- Hiring
- Human Resources
- Learning & Skill Development
- Job Search
- Meetings
- Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS)
- Project Management
- Research
- Sales Pages & Marketing Emails
- Strategic Planning
Content Creation
NotebookLM’s wide range of export formats makes it a great tool for creating content for the web, YouTube and social media. With NotebookLM, you can quickly create
- Explainer videos
- Podcasts and audio overviews
- Social media messages
- Infographics
- Reddit posts
- Blog posts
- Publishing interactive guides
Customer Support
Optimize your customer support by using NotebookLM to create comprehensive product knowledge bases that your support team can use to improve response time and accuracy of their responses. Upload product documentation, troubleshooting guides, FAQs, and past support tickets so your support team can query the notebook and get accurate answers with source citations.
Hiring
You can upload your hiring needs and NotebookLM can be used for:
- Creating job descriptions
- Insights into the job market, salary expectations in the current job market, skill shortages, etc
- Requirement summaries – create a list of must-have, should-have and nice-to-have skills
- Making a list of interview questions to find out if the candidates meet the requirements
- Creating practice interviews
- Summarize interview transcripts
- Screen applications to find ones worth interviewing – identify and rank candidates
- Analyze applications and compile insights
- Identify blind spots about a candidate
- Create a virtual hiring expert to assist you with the hiring
- Create a slide deck of your top candidates to present to your hiring team
- Create audio summaries of the top candidates and interact like a podcast host
- Turn hiring into a learning system, learning from past hires and employee performance and applying this to future hires
- Draft offer and follow-up communications
Human Resources
Use NotebookLM for:
- Hiring: See above
- Onboarding: Upload employee handbooks, company policies and training materials to create study guides, FAQs and learning tutors. Employees can ask questions in natural languages and get answers.
- Employee Knowledge Base: A dynamic, searchable library of all your training materials, company policies, SOPs, employee handbooks, etc.
- Performance Management Support: Keep all performance-related documents in one place and NotebookLM can help HR managers analyze trends, summarize feedback and identify discussion points for performance meetings.
- Objective Evaluation: NotebookLM can help create an objective evaluation of the employee’s performance to the goals and KPIs.
- Employee Training: See Learning & Skill Development below.
- Information Triage: If you have a lot of information coming in such as legal updates or information in Slack channels, you can use NotebookLM to triage the data, and then create concise reports or explainer videos to keep everyone updated.
- FAQs: Use NotebookLM to quickly create Frequently Asked Questions manuals for your employees.
- Difficult Meetings: Use NotebookLM to script and practice difficult meetings such as when you need to reprimand or terminate an employee.
- Safety Manual/Reports: Use NotebookLM to manage safety manuals, incident reports and to create safety training materials.
- People Analytics: Use NotebookLM to create surveys, exit surveys, feedback forms, and turn the date into actional insights.
Learning & Skill Development
NotebookLM is a fantastic tool for students, employees, or anyone needing to learn and develop skills. You can use NotebookLM to:
- Existing Learning Resources: Pull together the school or internal learning resources (course notes, instructional materials, recordings, SOPs, employee manuals, etc.) to create your own training resource centre
- Find Learning Resources: Find and incorporate new, authoritative sources online
- Audio on the Go: Create audio overviews for learning while you commute, exercise, or walk your dog
- Training Videos: Create explainer videos to simplify concepts and help you learn visually and auditorily
- Study Aids: Create flash cards and quizzes for studying
- Training Library: Create a range of training materials and turn them into a knowledge for students or employees
- Interactive Tutor: You can also create a custom learning guide within NotebookLM that will ask you questions and act as a personal tutor on any topic
- Learning Formats: In addition to explainer videos, audio overviews, and study aids, you can also create mind maps, infographics, FAQs and more
- Feedback: You can upload transcripts of your sales calls or email conversations and get feedback on your performance so you can improve. You can also have NotebookLM create scenarios such as common objections to the points you are trying to make so you can practice your arguments and get feedback on them
- Critical Thinking: You can ask questions such as “What am I missing?” to find blind spots in your thinking
- Visual Knowledge Mapping; Use the mind map function in NotebookLM to provide a more visual overview of any information
- Online Course/Publishing: While reviewing some of the shared template notebooks from others, I noticed a couple where people used the paste option to add course notes in a lesson-by-lesson basis, and then the studio to output learning materials and the students could use chat to interact with the material
Meetings & Internal Communications
Use NotebookLM to:
- Prep for meetings and create agendas
- Pull out action items from transcribed meeting notes
- Analyze group chats or Slack messages to find to-do items
- Prepare scripts for difficult meetings such as layoff notices
Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS)
Many of us work to create our own personal knowledge management system or PKMS. The goal of these systems is to capture knowledge, make useful connections between notes in our knowledge base, be able to retrieve knowledge and use the knowledge. For most of use, this means we have extensive notes taken in systems like UpNote, OneNote or Notion and spend a lot of time creating connections between notes. But we tend to struggle with how to actually turn these notes into actionable intel. NotebookLM helps fill this gap because you can use your existing notes, use the AI chat to interact with the knowledge and solve the problems you need solved, then create outputs like explainer videos, slide decks, audio overview, reports, and more. This knowledge synthesis is the missing part of the puzzle for most PKMS and note-taking systems.
Project Management
Use Notebook LM as a central hub to organize and analyze everything to do with a project – meeting notes, action items, status reports, emails, etc.
Research
- General Research: While my regular AI tools are great for research and brainstorming, NotebookLM is fast becoming my favorite for deeper research, primarily because I have more control over the sources. With regular AIs, I ask the question and get an AI-synthesized answer. Usually this is quite useful. But with NotebookLM, I can review each source, removing or turning off the ones that I don’t find credible or aren’t going the direction I want. I can add specific sources I know are of high quality and it is easy to add my own knowledge sources (my ebooks, online courses, blog, etc).
- Consulting: Recently, I was working on a consulting project with a client, helping them create AI workflows for email handling within Gmail. I was able to pull in information from multiple sources, the web, my Inbox Zero course, the client’s website, the client’s SOPs (standard operating procedures) and some email answer templates they had stored in Google Drive. This ability to pull together client information meant I was able to create more powerful AI workflows, much faster than I have in the past.
Sales & Marketing
You can train NotebookLM using:
- Your in-house sales materials
- Sales training from the best known sales trainers
- Videos of you doing sales proposals
- Sales call transcripts
- Common objections from sales emails and chats
- Support emails and chat transcripts
- Marketing campaign results
- Web traffic and SEO results including what key word most people are searching for
- Market research – competitor strategies and activities, industry publications, etc
You can analyze the above and:
- Find what works and what doesn’t
- Generate revises sales strategies and marketing channels
- Generate a new strategic marketing plan based on your results so far and competitor analysis and industry trends
- Create virtual focus groups using information from support emails and chats
Then you can use NotebookLM to create your sales materials, including:
- Sales slide decks
- Marketing and outreach emails
- Explainer videos
- FAQs
- Sales playbooks
- Proposal creation from RFPs (Request for Proposals)
Strategic Planning
For strategic planning, you can use NotebookLM to:
- Create a Centralized Knowledge Hub: Pull together your strategic documents, like industry reports, competitor reports, business plans, lean canvas, market analyses, performance reports, client feedback, support queries, and customer personas.
- Add Virtual Experts: Upload strategic planning guides, best practices, templates, and techniques from recognized experts.
- Output: You can output content as mind maps or slideshows for planning presentations and discussions.
- Action Plan: Create goals and action plans from your planning process and assign these goals and tasks to your team.
I hope you have enjoyed the NotebookLM use case video and article. Need help with NotebookLM or incorporating AI into your daily workflow? Reach out for a discovery call. https://bit.ly/garland-calendar