Transform your documents into audio summaries, thanks to Google.
Credit: Google
Regarding Google AI tools, you can first think Gemini assistant applicationOr maybe some of the nice tips you can do In Google Photos. However, Google has another powerful artificial intelligence tool which is ideal for collecting and bringing notes on any type of subject. It’s called Notebook.
The objective of notebooklm (the LM means a language model, of course) is to help you understand everything you are looking for. This will lend a hand by creating summaries, answering questions about the documents you have collected and linking data points if necessary. As is normal with this type of AI, it is always considered an experimental characteristic, and you must Check everything it produces for hallucinations.
That said, it is a potentially useful tool, and has just received another new feature: Audio preview. Essentially, this feature can create short podcasts, with Podcast AI hosts that summarize all the information you have gathered. Whether you are looking for 19th century literature or the new phone to buy, the audio preview will present it in a friendly and accessible way – and the results can be quite impressive.
You can access NotebookAnd the Gemini models underlie it, free of charge using your Google account. Try it with your own search notes and be ready to be surprised to see how natural the results are natural.
Beginning with notebooklm
Adding sources to notebooklm.
Credit: Lifehacker
If you are completely new on notebooklm, you can Connect with your Google account To start. You will see some examples of projects (called laptops) included so that you have a game with it. Open it Invention of the bulb One, for example, and try to ask the questions about the work of Joseph Swan, Thomas Edison and others.
The question-answer routine will be familiar if you have already used something like Chatgpt, Gemini or Copilot, but here, the training data used for the model are only the sources you have downloaded on your notebook, rather than on web wider. However, you can indicate links on web links, as well as add raw text, PDF, Google and Google documents (each laptop can have up to 50 sources).
To start assembling your own notebook, click Notebook Header (top left), then select New notebook. You will be asked to start adding sources to your new notebook; You can download documents from your computer, choose them from Google Drive, point notebooklm to web links and stick in the text of the clipboard. You can add more sources later by clicking on the + (more) button next to Sources on the left panel.
As soon as you start to add sources, notebooklm will start to summarize them for you, then suggest questions that you may want to ask. You can click on individual sources to visualize them separately and follow the links on the screen to assemble a FAQ, a study guide, a table of contents, a chronology or a briefing document for everything you have collected.
Produce your audio preview
Your podcast appears on the overview of the notebook.
Credit: Lifehacker
For the purpose of this guide, I downloaded a PDF of S recent study On how smartphone applications could be developed to measure blood pressure, cuff -free. I also added the support press release As a web link, to give notebooklm a little more equipment with which to work with.
Immediately, the suggested AI of questions invites how the application uses the technology of existing smartphones, what could be the potential advantages and what are the challenges in the development of this technology and overall, notebooklm a Emitted responses which made sense and which were accurate depending on the material provided. (As you use the application, the answers you get come with quotes that bring you to the sources of this information.)
To produce your podcast (or an audio preview), you must open the Notebook guide (There will be a link to the right if you are on the cat screen), then click Generate on the right. For the moment, there are no parameters with which you can play – you get the same two podcast hosts each time, a male voice and a female voice, speaking in English. After a few minutes of reflection, the audio starts to play and you can also download the file if necessary.
Impressive, but not without a few warnings
In my test, audio preview did an excellent job to summarize the search on the blood pressure application with a high level of precision, producing what looks like a natural podcast conversation between two people – although ‘She missed nuances and was a bit generic in places. As a technological demo and a summary tool, it’s really impressive, but if the details really count in your work, I would not count completely on AI at this stage.