Instructions for using NotebookLM for beginners

Google describes NotebookLM as “your personalized AI research assistant, powered by Google’s most powerful model – Gemini 1.5 Pro”. So what is NotebookLM, how does it work and should you invest the time to use it? The article below will help you get acquainted with NotebookLM and provide step-by-step instructions to get started.

What is NotebookLM?

NotebookLM is an AI tool developed by Google, designed to change the way users interact, analyze and understand information. Based on the latest Large Language Models (LLM) from Google, NotebookLM acts as a personalized research assistant that analyzes, synthesizes, and generates content based on the documents you upload.

Google NotebookLM works like a specialized AI notebook: you upload a document (PDF, text, Google Docs…), the system will build an AI “expert” for that exact set of documents, providing a source of information that is as deep and relevant as possible to your research needs.

Instructions for using NotebookLM

Begin

To start using NotebookLM, visit the NotebookLM website and sign in with your Google account.

After logging in, you’ll see easy-to-understand instructions to get started creating your first notebook.

Create a new notebook

To get started, select “Create” or “New Notebooks”.

You will be asked to upload initiation documents. There are 5 options:

• Download files from computer (PDF, .txt, Markdown)
• Paste the URL of a website
• Copy – paste text into Notebook
• Link to a Google Doc
• Link to a Google Slides

Choose the plan that suits your needs.

Note current limitations:

• Maximum 50 files, each file maximum 500,000 words
• Only supports text documents (not yet supported Excel)
• Large documents will take time to process
• With many documents, you should upload important files first for faster analysis by AI

Once the document is uploaded, NotebookLM is ready to assist you.

Activities you can do with Notebook LM

Ask questions

NotebookLM allows you to ask questions in natural language based on the documents you provide. There are three ways to ask questions:

• Click “Suggested questions (Suggested question)”.
• Enter your own questions in the bar at the bottom of the page.
• Open section “View Chat” to ask questions in the chat interface.

Generate ideas

In addition to answering questions, NotebookLM can “brainstorm” ideas according to user requests. You can ask for strategy suggestions, content ideas, research directions… right on the chat page.

Create notes page

This is where all your notes are collected, including:

• Handwritten notes: created manually by you
• Notes AI: automatically generated by NotebookLM upon request

Press “Add note” to create a new note, edit it and type it as you like. Handwritten notes will be marked with the label “Written Note” to distinguish it from AI notes.

Create podcasts with NotebookLM

One of NotebookLM’s most outstanding features is the creation of custom podcasts between two AI voices, discussing the content in your document.

Just select “Generate” in the section “Audio Overview” and wait a few minutes for the system to create the podcast.

The podcast does not cover every minute detail in the material. Instead, the AI ​​will decide which parts are most important to cover and discuss those parts.

Structured format

NotebookLM helps you organize content into structured formats like:

• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• Study guide
• Index
• Timeline
• Document summary

You can create quickly by selecting the pre-built templates at the top of the instructions page.

Overall, NotebookLM is a powerful tool for anyone who needs to research, summarize documents, or create personalized data-driven content. With the ability to ask natural questions, generate ideas, create podcasts and organize scientific notes, this is a great assistant for students, researchers, journalists or anyone working with long documents.