This blog post is part of a series focused on AI tools and strategies at Carleton, written by a Carleton student.
NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant designed by Google. It helps users understand, synthesize, and generate content such as summaries or outlines based on sources provided by you, the user, making it a powerful tool for academic inquiry. It’s important to note that NotebookLM is not like other AI assistants as it does not pull information from outside into its responses. Instead, NotebookLM only answers questions based on the information provided in your uploaded sources. However, NotebookLM now includes Deep Research and Web search integration features which can pull sources that you can use for source discovery. This application is available to everyone with a Carleton email as it is part of the Google Workspace for Education Plus suite. This tool can serve faculty, staff, and students through a variety of functions.
For Faculty: It can assist with material management, assessments and feedback, research, and publications.
For Staff: It can assist with research and content drafting, brainstorming, and creating meeting transcripts.
For Students: It can support studying resources and reviewing, project development, and understanding of complex concepts.
For more information NotebookLM Help is available. Some of the features I personally found helpful include:
Source materials
Within your individual notebooks, you can easily upload or link PDFs, websites, Youtube videos, audio files, Google Docs, and Google Slides, or discover new sources using the Deep Research feature. To understand your data, NotebookLM offers two methods for summarizing: you can ask for a summary for specific topics or find an auto-generated summary of the entire source or selection of sources in the Source Guide. To get more detailed summaries in the chat, ask specific questions about the information you’re looking for. While NotebookLM supports a wide variety of composition of sources, there are still some key limitations. Users can store up to 50 sources per notebook; individual uploads are capped at 50,000 words or 200MB.
Ask your own questions
Once you have uploaded your sources, you can ask the model questions about your source material. NotebookLM uses direct quotes, text, and images from your sources as citations. These citations allow you to verify the accuracy of the AI’s response by linking you directly to the original passage. Within your Source tab, you can use the checkboxes to each source to include or exclude certain sources the model can use to answer your questions. Additionally, once the Source Guide has generated initial summaries, it will suggest a series of follow up questions. These suggestions are phrased based on the central themes and core content for your specific sources, helping you dive deeper into the material. I found this feature rather helpful as I can ask follow up questions about the source to get a deeper understanding of a text.
Studio features
NOTE: Studio features are beneficial as tools for better understanding complex concepts but not as a replacement for learning.
The studio tab offers a wide variety of tools to generate your sources into materials tailored to various learning preferences. Currently, NotebookLM can generate audio, slide deck, videos, mind maps , reports, flashcards, quizzes, infographic, and data tables. Generated forms of information can help different learners further their understanding of the material. The following are some features I found helpful when using NotebookLM for the first time.
- Audio Overview: You can choose from different audio formats to suit your listening preferences. The format features a variety of narrative voices like Deep Dive, The Brief, The Critique, and The Debate. For example, The Brief is a bite size overview to help you grasp the core ideas from your sources quickly and the Critique is an expert review of your sources, offering feedback to help you improve your understanding.
- Slide Deck: You can generate either a detailed deck or presenter slides. These can be revised by using prompts to instruct the AI to adjust specific slides. The slides come with images and short descriptions of the different variables and themes from your sources. In addition, these slides can be downloaded as a PDF document or as a PowerPoint.
- Video Overview: These videos are customizable. This feature comes with a variety of visual styles including Custom, Classic, Whiteboard, Kawaii, Anime, Watercolor, Petro print, Heritage, and Paper-craft.
- Mind Maps: The mind map is interactive. You can select specific nodes to ask the AI targeted questions in the chat, helping you to deep dive into the relationships between the concepts. Although the map lacks images, it shows you the various ways concepts are related to each other while also highlighting the bigger picture of your sources.
IMPORTANT NOTE: NotebookLM is an AI powered assistant, and it can still be inaccurate. Always verify its outputs and practice good AI literacy skills when interacting with this bot. For more information about AI at Carleton, check out AI Literacy tips and AI policy reminders.
Share with others
To share notebooks privately, select the Share icon and grant either “Viewer” or ” Editor” access by entering a person’s Carleton email address. A Viewer has read-only access to all the documents and notes, whereas an Editor can view, add, or remove sources and notes in your shared notebook and share it further with other users. Any changes made by owners and editors will show up in shared public notebooks without needing to resend a new link. Any materials generated within the Studio tab can also be shared by sharing the link, sharing the entire notebook, or downloading and sharing the generated source. This is a great way for project teams of any kind to keep their sources organized and share citations with one another effortlessly.
Limitations
While NotebookLM is a powerful tool, there are instances where it may be unable to answer your questions. Some reasons for its inability to answer include:
- The content of your source may contain sensitive content or language, such as violence which may trigger safety flags. NotebookLM will flag the content and refuse to generate answers from it, or it may respond with “NotebookLM can’t answer this question.”
- Unclear phrasing: Unclear phrasing occurs when your Notebook contains many sources; NotebookLM retrieves the most relevant information first, then builds a response with the information. To avoid confusion, try rephrasing your question to be clearer or more specific; this helps NotebookLM locate the most relevant pieces of information for the question.
- Information is simply not in the sources. When this occurs, NotebookLM will alert the user that the information is not provided in the uploaded sources and will not answer the question.