NotebookLM: The Complete Guide (now Gemini Notebook)
In this guest post, Jeremy Caplan shows how to get the most out of one of the best free AI tools available.
Hi!
Today, Jeremy Caplan is sharing with us a guide to NotebookLM (my favorite AI tool for learning new subjects)
Jeremy is a tech curator and educator who writes Wonder Tools, a weekly Substack newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps for creative productivity. He also serves as Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.
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NotebookLM is the most useful free AI tool I've tried. It has twin superpowers. You can use it to find, analyze, and search through a collection of documents, notes, links, or files. You can then use NotebookLM to visualize your material as a slide deck, infographic, report — even an audio or video summary.
This week, Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. Same product, but it’ll do more across the Google ecosystem.
Getting Started with NotebookLM
Go to NotebookLM → Try NotebookLM → Create new notebook
At first sight, it looks similar to ChatGPT or Gemini
In “sources” you can see your uploaded materials (PDFs, docs, etc)
In “chat” you can chat with it (just like any other chatbot)
In “studio“ you can transform uploaded sources into different content formats
NotebookLM is more powerful than it looks.
The fact that its responses are grounded in the materials you upload makes it less likely to hallucinate about those topics than ChatGPT.
How to set up a notebook
Pick a purpose. Start a new notebook for a work project or a learning goal. Examples: I created a notebook to organize materials for the new online bilingual MA program we’re developing at the CUNY Newmark Grad School of Journalism where I work. I also set up a notebook to learn more about Gustav Mahler, a composer I revere. I have numerous others for work and personal projects.
Find sources for your notebook. NotebookLM recently added a search panel to help you discover high-quality sources. You decide which, if any, of the suggested materials to add to your notebook. The “Fast Research” is quick and focused, unlike a generic Google search that returns hundreds of results, some of which have gamed the search engine system.
Fast Research surfaces 10 or so documents related to your topic in less than 30 seconds. You can ask it to find sources within your Google Drive, or from the Web.
The Deep Research prompt option in the same panel will more slowly gather many more sources.
Tip: make your query as specific as possible to surface relevant, useful sources. Here’s an example of a concise, precise query I used.
Add your own materials. Upload files up to 200 MB and 500,000 words into your notebook. You can add:
Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets
PDFs, images (including photos of your handwritten notes), and Microsoft Word documents
YouTube links and audio, image, or video files (it extracts the transcript)
Website URLs (it extracts the text)
No other AI tool I’ve used lets you compile as many different kinds of materials in a centralized AI workspace that’s easy to explore and build with.
Free accounts can create up to 100 notebooks, with 50 sources in each. On a free plan, you may run into limits when creating multimedia materials. You can run free 10 Deep Research queries a month. Students in the U.S. 18 or older can get pro access for free.
Pro accounts, which cost $20/month as part of Google AI Pro, can host 500 notebooks with 300 sources in each. They can run 20 Deep Research queries a day.
Collaborate and share
NotebookLM now lets you collaborate as you would with Google Docs. You can choose to invite people as viewers or editors. Give them a full view of your sources and notes, or limit their access to the search/chat interface.
You can also publish notebooks publicly. Here are some examples:
Trends in health, wealth and happiness by Our World in Data
How to build a life, from The Atlantic
Parenting Advice for the Digital Age, by Jacqueline Nesi, PhD of Techno Sapiens
Secrets of the Super Agers by Eric Topol
Explore your materials
As you add materials, NotebookLM analyzes them and suggests relevant questions. After I uploaded biographical material about Mahler, it suggested search queries — based on the source documents — about why he converted to Catholicism and what poetry collections inspired him. You can also ask any question on your mind or type in any kind of traditional search query.
NotebookLM uses natural language processing to make sense of your documents. When you type in a query, the system understands what you’re looking for. When I queried about the death of Mahler’s loved ones, I didn’t have to mention their names or even their relationship to him — NotebookLM understood what I was asking. These exploratory searches are more powerful than old-fashioned keyword searches, which only work if an exact word combination appears in your document. NotebookLM makes it easy to run abstract queries as well, searching for moments of anger or surprise.
Tip: target specific sources. You can use the checkboxes next to each source to limit your search to particular documents. This precision is handy when you want to search within a specific report or compare information across just two or three key documents.
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Visualize information
Use the Studio tab to create shareable reports, slides, graphics, and multimedia out of your notebook material. Unlike other AI tools, NotebookLM’s creations are grounded in your source documents — they don’t pull from the Web or generic training data. Because they draw only from your source material, the creations will change as you add more to your notebook, or if you mark only a subset of sources to be used.
Create a mind map first to get an overview of the topics covered in a notebook. Then create the following elements to understand and share your material.
Infographics
Create polished visual summaries. Choose whether you want a landscape, portrait, or square image, and how simple or detailed it should be. Then type in an optional custom prompt to guide the design. You can include instructions about your preferred color palette, target audience, illustration style, and the kinds of numbers or facts to prioritize.
A caveat: NotebookLM consistently produces clean, readable text. It’s mostly accurate, but I’ve encountered occasional errors. Here’s an example: Mahler’s age of death is wrong at the bottom of this NotebookLM infographic.
Slide decks
NotebookLM’s newest capability — generating slide decks — continues to surprise me. When I ask it to make slides summing up notebook material — it comes up with outstanding results, like this slide deck about Mahler.
You can choose between detailed standalone slides, or simpler TED-style presenter slides meant to accompany a verbal presentation. As with the infographic tool, you can just press the slide deck button to let NotebookLM decide what to generate. But you’ll get something more relevant to you if you write a prompt to guide the visual style and subject matter focus. The slides include a small NotebookLM watermark in the bottom right corner.
Here’s an example of a slide deck about NotebookLM I created with NotebookLM
A caveat: In my testing, the slides have been clean and visually engaging. They’re not perfect, though. A deck about our new bilingual journalism program, for example, included misleading AI-generated images of our faculty members.
Video overviews
Create a video summary of the material in your notebook. Think of it as an AI-narrated slide show. Fortunately, there’s no talking avatar. I like how these videos include facts, examples, quotes, and images pulled directly from your source documents.
Choose between a brief video (1-2 minutes) or a longer explainer (often six to 10 minutes). You can’t specify the exact length. Tailor the approach to your viewers with a prompt. You can even specify a specific audience, whether board members of a charity you’re presenting to, or grandchildren new to your subject matter.
Videos can take five to 10 minutes to generate. Free accounts can generate only a few videos, slide decks, or infographics per notebook before hitting a usage limit. When your video — or other creation — is ready, you can download and share it, or view it within your notebook.
📺 Here’s a video overview of NotebookLM I created with NotebookLM
Podcasts
NotebookLM’s audio overviews became Internet famous for their remarkably human-sounding conversations. When I played a clip for a group of students when this feature launched, they didn’t realize the speakers weren’t human.
Example: Here’s a new “Deep Dive” audio piece I generated about NotebookLM for this post.
You can write a brief or detailed prompt to guide the style of the audio, and you can choose from multiple formats.
After a few minutes, the audio file is ready for you to download and share.
Tip: add an AI-generated label to this kind of audio or any other material you create with NotebookLM. That way people will know where it came from and won’t assume you created each detail from scratch.
You can generate audio pieces from a subset of your documents or your full collection of sources. Here are the four kinds of audio you can generate, with an example of each:
Debate. Here’s an audio debate I prompted NotebookLM to create about which of its features are most useful.
Critique. Here’s a critique of NotebookLM I generated from 19 sources I added.
Brief summary. Here’s a 90-second audio overview.
Deep dive. Here’s a deep dive NotebookLM explainer.
Text reports
In addition to multimedia, you can generate custom reports. The reports tend to be around 2,000 to 3,000 words, or six to 12 pages. Here are example reports generated by NotebookLM: an advanced guide to NotebookLM and a guide to integrating NotebookLM in a newsroom.
I’ve found the dozens of reports I’ve generated to be thorough enough to be useful for reference or learning. They also help point to sources worth exploring further. Try prompting NotebookLM to create the following kinds of reports:
Timelines: Organize chronological information
FAQs: Common questions and answers about your topic
Explainers: Break down complex concepts
Teaching guides: Useful if you’re an educator or lead workshops
Student handbooks: Supplemental resources
Critiques: Analysis of weaknesses or limitations in your sources
Debate reports: Multiple perspectives on controversial topics
Flashcards and quizzes
When learning something new, create flashcards or quizzes with multiple-choice questions to test yourself.
Describe your level of understanding (e.g. “I’m new to this,” or “I’m a professional in this field, but I’m new to this framework,”).
Choose whether you want small or large number of questions or flashcards.
Specify concepts you want the quiz or flashcards to focus on.
You can also ask NotebookLM to focus on a particular source, like a certain link, PDF, or video you’ve uploaded. Example: Check out my NotebookLM flashcards.
5 Projects to Try
1. Organize a work project
Each time you add a file, NotebookLM summarizes it. Its full text is then searchable with citations, so you know you’re not getting AI hallucinations. To assemble a useful notebook, gather relevant documents, including:
Plans, internal reports, or project memos
Links to relevant sites
Meeting recordings or transcripts
Important emails copied and pasted or saved as PDFs or docs
Background reports, company manuals, or competitive research
Use your project notebook to:
Create summary reports or timelines to onboard new team members
Draft slide decks for internal meetings
Make infographics to visually summarize complex processes or workflows
Quickly find relevant quotes, stats, anecdotes, or examples
Refresh your memory when returning to the project later on
2. Plan a trip
I create travel notebooks to help me find relevant family activities and ideas for outings. I’ve done this before with Perplexity and other AI platforms, but I like the way NotebookLM lets me gather so many different kinds of inputs: links, videos, articles, and local guides—everything I might want to reference when planning weekend activities or hosting visitors. You can find these kinds of resources with a Google or Perplexity search, or do the whole process within NotebookLM.
For travel planning, compile these materials:
Historical and cultural information
Entertainment guides and reviews
Restaurant recommendations
Local blog posts, event listings, or links to top attractions
Then ask NotebookLM to generate:
Itineraries
FAQs about your destination
Recommendations based on your budget or other constraints
Slide decks or infographics to share with your travel companions
Flashcards for learning key phrases if you’re traveling abroad
Quiz games to play at the airport while waiting in line
3. Learn something
Here’s a meta use-case: I created a notebook about NotebookLM to help me learn about its nooks and crannies. (Try the quiz about NotebookLM it created for me.) I made another one about “deliberative dialogue” to learn more about tactics for encouraging civil discourse between people who violently disagree.
To build a learning notebook:
Upload relevant YouTube videos, articles, and course materials.
Use the “Add Sources” panel to add docs from your Google Drive or the Web.
Generate mind maps, quizzes, and flashcards to test your understanding.
Create audio guides to learn while exercising, cleaning, or commuting.
Prompt for timelines, FAQs, explainers, infographics, and slide decks tailored to your knowledge level and learning goals.
Tip: break large documents into smaller pieces
NotebookLM uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for search. That keeps it grounded in your material and avoids hallucination. But it also means that when asked to quickly search gigantic documents, NotebookLM may have the capacity to scour only a subset of your source material.
To avoid searches that miss important material, consider breaking enormous documents into smaller pieces and narrowing your searches to specific sources or more precise subjects.
4. Compile reference guides
Build notebooks to help you handle recurring tasks.
Grant writing. Compile successful applications, guidelines, or evaluation criteria.
Social posts. Gather style guides, brand guidelines, and examples of past posts that have worked well for you or competitors.
Technical documentation. Assemble specs, organizational rules, or industry best practices.
Customer research. Add past surveys, interview transcripts, analytics reports, or testimonials. Tip: as a first step, strip names and emails from surveys or interviews to protect respondents’ privacy.
5. Manage home projects
Create notebooks for life outside of work. NotebookLM is great for this because unlike other AI tools, it lets you input so many different kinds of sources with huge file sizes, whether you have videos, audio files, PDFs, your own handwritten notes, links to various sites, or Google Drive files.
Recipe collections and guides to various cooking techniques
Home improvement projects with how-to articles and product reviews
Hobby research for woodworking, guitar, photography, or gardening
Why NotebookLM Stands Out 📍
Unlike AI assistants designed around an open-ended chat box, NotebookLM is structured around a more familiar paradigm: a searchable notebook. The closest parallels are Claude Projects or ChatGPT Projects, which allow you to organize documents in a folder that can inform AI queries on those services. Perplexity Spaces is also useful for organizing related search threads. But none of those can generate NotebookLM’s full range of outputs, and each draws on its own training data as well as your sources.
NotebookLM’s citation system means you can trust its search results, because you can see the cited section in your original document. And it’s unique in being able to generate everything from audio and video to reports, slides and infographics from your source materials.
Note: Citations aren’t provided within infographics, slide decks, video or audio overviews. If there are tidbits from those you want to trace back to a source, summarize the fact or detail in question in NotebookLM’s explore tab — the chat window — to ask for a citation.
The free tier is powerful enough for most people. And it keeps improving, adding significant new capabilities every couple of months.
The bottom line: if I were forced to recommend a single AI tool for many different kinds of readers, I’d pick NotebookLM.
More NotebookLM Guides
For more, read these guides about NotebookLM:
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NotebookLM's biggest advantage isn't that it's another chatbot—it's that it starts with your corpus instead of the internet. That changes the interaction from asking questions to building a persistent knowledge workspace.
Still many typo’s in text in figure