Has Anyone Made Use of NotebookLM?

Frank Hodges

I like their implementation of AI. ChatGPT and Perplexity are great, but the idea that you can upload your own sources and generate responses solely from those sources is pretty cool. I have played with it a few different ways. I've uploaded my Bible Studies, some sermon transcripts and even a mishmash of popular and academic books on a particular subject. I've tried to throw it a few curveballs and upload a few documents from opposite sides of the theological spectrum, and I've liked how it handles it, though from what I've seen if you upload a total of five documents (lets say 4 blue and 1 red) it will tend toward a bias for the more common documents (what it spits out will be skewed blue). It'd be cool if it developed a bias toward the documents which contain the best evidence or build the best case on a particular subject. That said, idk how possible that would be with AI considering its limitations.

They recently released a feature where it will create a (very real sounding) deep dive podcast on your sources. 

Have you guys played around with it and found any best use-cases for it? What do you like or dislike about it? 

Antony Brennan

Have you guys played around with it and found any best use-cases for it? What do you like or dislike about it? 

 I have played around with it quite a bit.   A good thing is that it is almost devoid of AI hallucinations as it only answers questions about the resources you upload or direct it to.

I found that if you give it links to YouTube videos, it extracts the transcript so you can ask questions of the video content. Google’s Gemini can do this but has the hallucination tendency as it will wander off into other internet content it has access to.

An example is: I am a fan of the Bauer and Traina ”Inductive Bible Study“ book.  On YouTube, there is a series of nine videos which comprise a lecture given by Bauer. I have watched it through twice. I uploaded the URLs to NotebookLM and was able to have it list some of the items Bauer lists rather than taking notes. He talked about the types of ”Interpretive questions” he says we should ask as we study. I was able to get a list of those  questions without having to stop and write them all down. I also asked many other questions.  I hope that in the future, Logos implements this kind of ability so we can question our resources there. 

Another thing I enjoyed is asking Notebook LM to look at a resource and provide a list of questions I could ask myself after reading it to increase my comprehension of the text.  I find that a very useful thing to do.  In Logos, I have been pasting text from a resource into the Sermon builder and getting it to generate questions about the text, which is pretty useful for my purposes.  I would also like to see Logos implement that in a sidebar like the summary process. I use summaries for the same purpose. If you read a summary of a chapter, it is easier to comprehend and remember what you have read when you read the actual chapter. 

The deep dive podcast feature is totally off the scale.  It is a great way to get an introduction to what a text is about.  I can’t remember the amount of times I have looked on YouTube for a video with an author talking about their book. The deep dive is like a mini version of that.  

The only downside I can see so far is that you have to upload most things rather than just refer to them.