6 cool things we’ve done or heard about that Google’s NotebookLM makes possible

We're sharing these with the intention of discovering more. Please let us know of the fabulous ways you are using this magical tool.

In no particular order:

1. Your business re-writing assistant: helping to analyse and process content from your 'archive(s)' of useless old documents. Load Notebook up with your 'sources', and it will help you work out what your content is about, glean the valuable stuff, and rewrite and optimise the rest. With luck, you'll be able to transform it into something more valuable.
2. Creating brand new case studies, and optimising and transforming these into many different versions: As an example, we wanted to write am case study for a project we've been working on with Applied Data Science Partners. TutorBot is a generative AI tutor chat-bot for high-school students. Writing a case study together is challenging but Notebook made this process easier and quicker, by creating a shared resource we could add many sources to and experiment with generating many versions of the same story (for Partners, marketing, awards entries etc).
3. Taking any article or case study and turning it into a WIRED article from the future: This is something else we did with the TutorBot case study. It's that thing where you write the positive article from the future, but it makes that insanely easy. We got it to re-write the TutorBot case study as if it’s an article in WIRED, The Verge and Forbes - or any title “in the style of…”. Notebook does an entertainingly passable job (better and faster than you can), but what matters here is the way it lets you rapidly explore project outcomes from different perspectives. They’re too long for here, but potentially interesting to look at so I’ve uploaded a few of them to this Drive link.
4. Analysing legal documents: I started by creating a Notebook for Non Disclosure Agreements. I added a whole bunch of notes and guidance on red flag risks to look out for. Notebook analyses new NDAs against these and suggests changes we need to ask for. How useful is that?! We've since used Notebook to help us understand and search property contracts and complicated public tender docs that tend to be written in obtuse language with loads of cross referencing. It’s great at cutting through the legalese and chuff and highlighting issues.
5. Turning WhatsApp chats into podcasts: h/t to Matthew Kershaw here for posting about how he’d scraped his family WhatsApp group, uploaded it to Notebook and used the new Audio Overview podcast creation feature to turn it into a podcast. I just did the same for my youngest son’s school class parents' WhatsApp group. It was hilarious and a bit lovely. A colleague is considering doing the same with his Dad’s Football Team, using text from their Spond Team App to create a regular podcast. Matthew thinks the podcast feature is a abit of a novelty but I’m not so sure. Loads of people listen to the Economist and FT articles read out by a (not even very good) robot: audio is just more convenient.
6. Employee feedback, appraisals and annual reviews: Yeah, not sure about this one. A close friend told me - I suspect half in jest - that they’d started putting performance reviews for their team into Notebook and turning them into (private) podcasts. I then tried it, and there’s something pretty interesting about it: I think it’s the transformation of dull words on a page into a more lively, chatty and perhaps celebratory format. Certainly makes it more interesting. But with the experiment I did, there was perhaps more for me to reflect on about the way I’d given feedback than I bargained for! One to try.

Please share your interesting NotebookLM experiments. I was searching for something that might help me organise recipes I find online but can't see anyone using Notebook. Anyway, we're big fans and Notebook keeps getting better by the day.

You can find it here: https://notebooklm.google/