NotebookLM Major Upgrades You Might Have Missed

I've covered Notebook LM on this channel since  2023, and they recently rolled out some major   updates that completely changes the way I use  Notebook LM. So, I wanted to share those with   you in this video. I specifically picked seven  new updates that rolled out in the last couple   months that I think you'll find really useful and  practical, too. And I also have an example for you   at the end that actually is inside of Google  Gemini that combines it with Notebook LM in a   really nice way. Okay, I'll jump into an existing  notebook to show you the very first one. And   by the way, if you don't have a paid version of  Notebook LM, which is $20 a month and if you have   a Google Workspace account, it comes free with  that. It has this section called future notebooks   too. And these are pretty useful. This one's  created by Google Research and these work like   any other notebook. You could actually interact  with it, ask any questions here and look at all   these sources. But right now, let me jump into an  existing notebook that I have. And the very first   update I want to show you is up here. And one of  my favorite workflows that I've shared in other   videos was using Google Gemini's deep research,  which I think is by far the best deep research   agent that's available right now and then bringing  that information as a source. Well, I no longer   have to jump into those two apps. They built  deep research right inside of Notebook LM. And   they have two version of it. Fast research, which  is basically web access. It will go find sources   for you. And deep research, that's when it takes  10, 20 minutes and it gathers ton of different   information for you on a specific topic. And you  could combine that web search with the content   from your Google Drive, too. So, when you do the  research, combine it with pulling information as   a source from your Google Drive. More and  more lately, I've been storing more inside   of my Google Drive to make it my central knowledge  base. So I could actually jump between ChatgPT and   Google Gemini and still have a central knowledge  base here that doesn't really get lost inside   of one of those chatbots. And when you run fast  research or deep research, you'll see this type   of information. It pulls in multiple different  sources. You could still be selective. That's   the whole point of notebook. I wouldn't just say,  okay, import all these seven or in a case of deep   research, it might be a whole lot more than that.   I will actually look through these. Sometimes I'll   go to that web page to make sure I'm importing  really clean sources. I want my information in   Notebook LM to be grounded on these sources. So  I want to make sure I am selective here. So if   you don't want to bring all of them in, you could  just select the ones you do want to bring in and   then import them here and it will bring them in as  sources here on the left side. And when you create   a new notebook too, you'll see that front and  center. So that's become actually my very first   place to find sources. And then I combine those  sources with files that I upload, web links or   YouTube videos or anything from my Google Drive  over here. And if you have the paid account,   you will get up to 300 sources inside of each  individual notebook. With a free account, you get   50. Next is customized video overview. So video  overview is one of the best features inside of   Notebook LM that generates explainer videos that  are grounded entirely on your own sources. But   they have a lot of customization options that most  people overlook. So, if you press the pencil icon   next to video overview inside of any notebook that  you create, you'll see lots of different options.    So, I wanted to explain some of these for you. And  then you'll see two formats. The explainer, that's   going to be more longer structured content, or you  get this one, the brief byte-size overview to help   you grasp a concept very quickly. Then you also  have visual styles. So, the auto select, that's   what we had since video overview came out, but now  you have lots of different options available. So   let's say you want a paper craft style for example  or whiteboard is actually one of my favorites for   doing explainer videos. You will choose that and  it will create that type of a style video. Then   you have this option. What should the AI host  focus on? So if you have a notebook like the   one I have here where I have over 50 different  sources across different topics, I may want to   focus that. So maybe I just want to focus on  Google Gemini use case for business instead of   other topics of research here like notebook LM's  use case. And then once you generate it, I'll show   you a little bit of one I generated here. Okay, so  you're ready to go beyond the basics with Gemini.    Let's really level up your skills. Level one,  it all starts by connecting Gemini right into   your Google apps. It searches across everything at  once, breaking down those pesky information silos.    You just ask a simple question and it finds info  buried deep in your files and meetings. You can   also create what are called gems, custom versions  of Gemini for specific tasks. And one more thing I   wanted to show you is when you do create these,  if I go back to the studio tab before I create   video overview, you can actually decide what  sources are being used. It doesn't have to be   based on your entire notebook. So if you wanted  to generate it based on a select set of sources,   let's say in this case only this source, I could  select that. I'll choose this option over here and

it will generate one based on just that one source  instead of my entire notebook. The next upgrade   inside of notebook LM is the way they upgraded the  report format. So if you click on reports here,   you'll see some new formats here and suggested  formats that I wanted to explain. And these are   all customizable too. Some of these were actually  different cards over here in the previous upgrade,   but now they're all part of this report format.   So, under format, you'll see briefing docs. This   is one of my favorite all-time ways to use  Notebook LM. This typically takes all your   sources and gives you a compressed two, three page  version of it, but you can customize these. So,   you could describe what type of report you want to  create. Blog post is one of their newer options.    So this will create an entire blog post, a  very nicely formatted blog post from all your   sources over here. And you could again look at the  prompts. This is the system prompt that creates   these type of blogs. And then you could customize  it to make it your own here. But the best part   here is probably this new option suggested formats  because this is based on your notebook. And again,   you could press the pencil icon and change the  instruction here. But you'll see usually four   different options that are very useful. And  when you click on any of them, it will go ahead   and generate the report based on all your sources  here. They also have an option for creating your   own. So this one's really useful. Let me show you  a really interesting way to use this because I   know a lot of people that are not used to creating  these type of prompts are not exactly sure what   to put here. So, I'm going to go ahead and take a  screenshot of this here and I'll just go to Google   Gemini and I could upload that and ask it to help  me come up with things to put in that box. I want   to create a report in Notebook LM. Can you give  me five different descriptions I could put in   this box to get a custom report and this will just  help you see how those type of instructions are   formatted or descriptions are formatted. So, this  is actually a good one opposing viewpoints. So   you could ask Gemini to continue to give you other  options here. And sometimes Gemini actually knows   things about you if you've used it for a while.   So it'll use its memory and its context here to   give you more specific personal information. And  your initial prompt, you could tell it what your   notebook is about. So it could tailor it even  more for you. And that custom prompt gave me   this report here based on all my 55 sources. Now,  here's a really interesting use case that I want   to show you. With this option, I could actually  select this amount of text here. And I could go   back to studio and I could actually create a note  from it. And if I want to alter this note in any   way or just use it exactly as is, I could do that.   And now what I could do is with that note created,   I could actually make that note be a source.   So I'm going to convert this note to a source   over here. And then what you could do is you  could unselect all the sources and only choose   that source. And then you could turn it into an  audio overview which is similar to video overview   and you have all kinds of custom settings  available too or a video overview to consume   that information. But it's a useful workflow. You  actually starts with all your sources turning to a   custom report and only that custom report turning  into an audio or video overview. So at this point   you're probably seeing this pattern here that  notebook LM is all about taking your research   and turning it into something you could actually  use. I want to share a resource that helps you do   that even faster. HubSpot put together a free  guide called How to do 10 hours of research in   20 minutes. It shows you how marketers are using  Google Gemini and Notebook LM together to speed   up their research without losing any quality.   So instead of jumping between different tabs,   different docs, scatter notes, the guide shows  you how to do effective research in Gemini,   bringing in everything and organizing it with  Notebook LM, helping you summarize it the right   way, turning it into audio, video, and reports  that you could actually share with your team to   consume the information. And my favorite part is  the 11 practical application for using Gemini and   Notebook LM together. That's one of my favorite  all-time combos. This includes full workflows for   content creation, marketing strategy, customer  research, SEO, content optimization, and much   more and with real world examples you could  actually use. If you're already using Notebook LM,   this is going to help you get a lot more out of  it. And if you're new to Notebook LM, this gives   you a really clear system to follow. You could  download the guide for free using the link in the   description of the video. And thanks for HubSpot  for sponsoring this video and creating these   resources that I could share with my audience. The  next update on my list is infographics. And the   infographic option lets you create customized  visuals based on your sources. And just like   the other examples, you could select all your  sources or in my case, I'm going to select the   one individual source, which makes it much more  effective for an infographic that I could create   here with again your own customization. So if  you click the pencil icon, you could decide   what orientation you want. So landscape is just  going to be your traditional 16 by9 size. A lot   of times you may want to create portrait or square  especially if you're sharing to social platforms   that require those type of sizes. And then the  level of details. Do you want a lot of details?

They have this detail option that has a lot of  text. So some people prefer this. And then you   could describe the style of the infographic. How  many things do you want to include there? Or how   do you want the colors and the style to be? In  this case, I'm just going to create one without   typing anything here so you can see the default  style that it creates for you. Now, here's one   version that is created for us and it has a lot  of text, but a lot of times these work well on   LinkedIn, for example. And from that one source,  I actually type to make the most minimalistic   version of it with only one topic. And here is a  very simple version that is created for us. And   every time you press that tab here, it will create  a new version. So this is the standard version   that we got that has a little bit less detail than  the detailed version. So you could decide which   one you want. This actually uses nanobanana in the  background to create these type of graphics that   are sharable and downloadable. Now slide decks  is one of the most useful upgrades they've ever   rolled out into notebook. And when you're doing  research a lot of times you're doing research to   share with people. You have to share with your  team or any business partner you have. Well,   this helps you do that in a really effective way.   This option right here, this dedicated option for   slide presentations will create that for you. So,  I'm going to press the pencil icon. And they have   two different styles. They have the detail style,  which this is going to have quite a bit of details   in each slide with a lot of text. Or the presenter  style, which is the one I like. This is clean. The   visual slides have the key talking points, but not  everything you need to say. So, this is useful,   especially if you know the presentation here. And  here you could describe what you want covered, who   you're talking to, your audience here, and even  the style of the slideshow presentation. In this   case, let me show you one that's just the default  version here. And I'll generate that. Again,   remember, if you only have one source selected,  it's going to use that one source, but when it   does get created, it'll show you how many sources  were used. So you could do all the sources in this   case 55 which would be very confusing for making  an infographic or in this case you could select   one or two especially for this slide deck. This is  a good source that I'm turning into a slide deck   here to share with my team. And here's what that  ends up looking like. These are all the different   slides that is created for us here. In this case  let's see about 13 different slides. And you could   also press play here and look at it in slideshow  format, which is great for presenting this right   out of Notebook LM. And if you want to download  this, these are fully downloadable here. And it   downloads them in PDF format like this that you  could store or share or even use it as a source   inside of another notebook. That brings us to the  very next one next to it called data tables. Now,   data tables will organize your information in  a different way in data tables. And it doesn't   have to be just sources that are number based.   They'll do that with any type of source. So I   actually created one using all the different  sources in this notebook. And these are also   like all these other ones customizable. So you  could try to type things in on how you want things   organized. In this case, it's asking you to use  columns with titles and authors and key results.    But you don't have to do that. It will generate  something without you typing something. And just   like the rest of these options, you could type in  any information you want in the custom box, like   anything that you want stored in a specific column  or a specific row. It'll try to do that here. And   you'll get this type of result here. This was from  my entire sources here. And you could do this with   individual sources. And the nice thing is again,  we're inside of a Google product. So this option   will export it directly to Google Sheets. And  inside of Google Sheets, you could format anything   that you want. Google Sheets also has the power  of Gemini here. So you could interact with this   document here. Now inside of Google Sheets to pull  in more information, add formulas or anything else   you want. Okay, let me show you this next one and  then we'll jump into Google Gemini for that bonus   one I mentioned in the beginning. Sharing your  notebook also got some really useful upgrades.    So I'm going to press share up here. especially  if you have a paid account or if you have this   inside of Google Workspace. That's one of the  main reasons you may want to upgrade for sharing   and also analytics where you could see how people  are viewing this notebook here. But if I share it,   here are some really useful options they've added.   So they've added a welcome note. Add a welcome   note to a user. So when they open the notebook,  they will see this welcome note. So I could paste   a welcome note. You have up to 500 characters here  for that. But the more useful options here, which   are inside of pretty much any Google product, are  these right here. notebook access. You could keep   it to restricted. So only if you type someone's  email up here, they will get an invite and they'll   be able to join. Or you could do anyone with a  link. In this case, I'll do anyone with a link.    And here's the more useful part. You could  actually give it access to the full notebook   so they could see all your sources, for example,  or the chat only option, which is really useful,   and you could preview that. The chat only option  looks like this. They could literally chat with   your notebook, but they won't see any of your  sources. You could keep those private. That

comes in really handy. And when someone shares  that with you, this is my other account here.    I jump into this was shared through a public link.   I could see all the sources because I gave it full   notebook access. I could chat with all these  sources. individual sources.    And I could see all the different things that were  created using all the studio options. And let me   show you this bonus here that's actually inside  of Google Gemini. And Google Gemini allows you to   bring in things from Notebook LM. So, if I select  the plus sign here and I choose notebook LM here,   it pulls in all kinds of different notebooks  in that Google account. So, if I select the   one we've been working on here and add it, I  could use Gemini to interact with it. But here's   something we didn't have inside of notebook LM.   I could actually use more powerful models here.    I could decide to choose the fast model, the  thinking model, or if I have a paid version,   the pro model. Sometimes that is also included  with limited use in the free accounts too. And   then on top of that, I have access to other  useful tools that are only available inside   of Gemini like canvas mode here. So I'm going to  ask you to write a blog using canvas. So now I've   combined my entire 56 source notebook, the power  of the pro model of Gemini, and canvas mode inside   of Gemini to get something really, really useful.   And if you haven't used canvas mode before, canvas   mode can easily make alterations to anything you  write. It can make it shorter, you can make it   longer. It has all these options for changing the  tone really easily without having to prompt it.    And you could also format it. And on top of that,  inside of Gemini now, I have some of those things   that were inside of Google M like infographics  or this new option inside of Gemini only where   I could turn this blog now into a web page. And  in a few minutes, we got this really nice looking   web page here. again from our notebook LM sources  and this also is fully sharable using the sharing   option here inside of Google Gemini. Now, if you  want to dive deeper, we have an entire education   platform called Skill Leap. There we cover the top  AI tools. I have an entire notebook LM course. I'm   actually updating that right now with all these  new updates, a Gemini course, AI agent courses,   and all of those are under one place and under  one subscription. And I have a 7-day free trial.    We have six instructors. I want to make sure it's  a good fit for you. You could watch as much as you   want for free, download any resources for free,  talk to us in the community, and then if it's a   good fit, you could pay month to month or we  have a yearly option that's more discounted.    And I'll link that in the description with all the  other resources. And I recently also made a video   covering all the different Google AI tools all  in one video. So, I'll link that video over here