Google's New AI Study Tool Makes Studying Bearable

So a few years ago when I was studying physics at Cambridge, I would have loved having a tool like this because it would have saved me a lot of time by helping me understand information faster. And basically it's a tool by Google called Notebook LM. And it's described itself as the ultimate tool for understanding information that matters. And it's completely free to use as well. And this is how I would have personally used it for my university studies. So when you go on the homepage, which is linked in the description, you can go to try

notebook over here. And then you can see a page that looks like this. And basically it says that it's a chatbot grounded in your sources. And the problem with other chat bots like chat GBT is that when you upload sources or when you use sources it doesn't citate like the sections properly that it used to generate the information. And sometimes it doesn't do it at all and that can make you wonder whether what it's saying is actually correct or not. So in the case of learning anything such as research, you want to make sure what you're learning is actually grounded in sources. And that's what it's very useful for. So you can go over here and then you can press create a new notebook. And then you should see a pop-up where you can upload sources and it can be a PDF, text file, markdown, audio. You can upload files from Google Drive. You can add links to websites or YouTube videos or even paste text that you've copied yourself. And you can add up to 50 sources on the free version. But basically, I'm going to close this now. And you should see something that looks like this where it's sources on the left hand side and then you have like a studio mode on the right. So let's upload some sources to begin with. I'm going to call this relativity. So this will be for general relativity which is one of the lecture courses that I took in Cambridge. So if I go to my relativity folder I can see some of the lectures that we had at Cambridge and this is the first relativity lecture and what I can do is I can drag and drop this into the sources area. So if I go back press add then I can drag and drop this into here. And even though it's a video it's going to load it as a audio file instead. And then let's add a few more lectures as well. So I'm going to add lecture two as well. Uh and then let's add lecture three too. And now we just have to wait for a second for it to transcribe the files. And you can see the first file is already transcribed. So if I click on this then this is all the content that was added during the lecture and it gives a quick summary of this resource as well. So any of the sources that you upload it gives a quick summary of. So it's going to transcribe lecture 2 which just happened. And then we can also add some other materials as well. So I can add in the lecture notes as well. So I'm going to add in all the lecture notes that I had available. And then adding in all of this I can see it's all loading in. And I can click on any of these PDFs and I can see the text I extracted from the PDF. So now that I

have all the sources imported in, I can make a audio overview of it. So I'm going to select lecture one and then topic zero and also topic one and two. So the first few bits of the whole relativity topic and I can press customize over here where it says deep dive conversation to hosts. Press customize and I'm going to say can you provide a highle overview of everything that was covered? Use analogies and examples to help me understand it better. And if I press generate, then it's going to take a few minutes to generate a conversation between two people that's happening on this topic. And basically, as you'll see shortly, it makes a podcast style conversation of two people discussing this topic. And I don't know about you, but for me personally, when I hear two people discussing a topic, such as on a podcast, I usually retain the information better than if I hear someone monologuing about the information. And I think the way this podcast episode kind of thing is designed is very engaging and it's actually quite accurate as well based on the source material. So what I would personally do is before the lecture if there are previous year's lectures that you can download and use or there's resources for all the lectures that are coming up I would download them import them into notebookm and then I would generate an audio overview of what's being covered. So whilst it's generating

we can also do create a study guide. So when we press create a study guide then it'll make a new note based on these four sources. So you can see the new note is over here and it says relative to study guide and I can rename it to anything that I want and it basically covers a lot of the key definitions and concepts and ideas and some of the key formula too and then it gives me practical study tips as well which I think are quite useful and also a short quiz I can use to test myself and I'll

be going through the short quiz aspect shortly but I think the podcast style thing is done so if I go back here you can see that there's a 16minute audio recording that was generated about these sources so I can press play. It says that being at rest in a uniform gravitational field is locally indistinguishable from being in a constantly accelerating frame in gravity-free space. So standing on earth feels the same as being in a rocket. So listening to whole thing I think it's a very accurate for the topic of relativity to my understanding. And basically what you can do is you can press change audio speed and listen to it faster or you can press download and then download the MP3 file to your computer and then you can transfer it onto your phone and then listen to it with an MP3 player or something like that. So you can imagine the situation that for your particular university they have the lecture notes online for that particular lecture that's going to be happening tomorrow. So you can create a study audio guide for it and then download it and listen to it on the way to lecture. And one of the neat things about it is that you can press interactive mode which is very new and also chime in on the conversation that's happening. So if I press this I can stop playing the audio. Welcome to the deep dive. We take complex topics dive into the sources you care about. And then as I'm listening to this, if I'm confused by anything or I want to explain better, then I can just press the join button and I can get them to explain it to me. So if I do that now, covering both special and general relativity. Sounds heavy. Oh, hey, welcome. What's up? So what is the difference between special relativity and general relativity? That's a great question. Okay, let's unpack this. Essentially, special relativity is the starting point, right? It deals with space and time and how they're connected, but it does so in the absence of gravity. And yeah, I think that's perhaps the most impressive feature about all of us where you can button to conversation that's happening. So, it's kind of like a radio show almost where you can engage with what's being said and what's going on. Anyway, we can press a close audio overview and

then we can also go back and then look at these suggested questions or we can add a question ourself. And basically, one of these suggested questions gave this answer. You can see all the sources are used here like you can see the actual transcript of where they said this particular thing and then you can press save to note because if you don't save it as a note then it will like no longer be available because this chat is not permanent. So anything you save to note will be something you can access later. Anything you don't save it will end up being refreshed. But if we press a refresh button over here, press refresh to clear declare our chat

history. Then we can press mind map as well and it's now going to generate us a mind map of everything that was happening in that particular lecture and also notes. And now that the mind map is done, I can click here to open the mind map. And one of the nice things about this is that when you click on anything here, then it will create a new chat for it. So if I click on recap of special relativity and then click on I don't know initial frames, then it will say discuss what the sources say about initial fra frames and then it loads a lot more information I can also chat with as well. And there's a couple other things that may be useful for you such as a timeline view which provides like historical context especially if you're doing something history related or something that follows a series of events. A briefing document I think that's more useful for business related things instead of actually studying. And an FAQ I think that's also more useful for business stuff. And now if you use

ENI for studying you can also import the short quiz that I made into. So I can go in the study guide that we made earlier in the video and scroll down and then there is a short quiz and it has 10 questions and 10 answers as well. So I want this in a format that can easily understand. So I would copy this over, go to chat jp and then paste this into chat jpt and say can you turn this into a txt file with a pipe separator so it can be imported into an to be used as flashcards. And this prompt will also be in the description down below. So you can just copy it over. And now you can see made this. txt file. And if I click here then it will download. And then I can go to an ini you can see I have my relative deck and I can go to an I mean file and then press import and then select the file that I just made and then for field separator I will just press pipe and you can see everything is stored nicely. So this is column one this is column 2 and I want the note type to be uh basic and I want deck to be relativity and as for existing notes ignore that and so forth. And now you have the field mapping. So the front is going to be number one over here. So number one which is what is the fundamental something something. And then the back is going to be number two over here. And then I can press import and then you can see all these uh flashcards or have been made for us. So I can press show and then I can see all the ones that notebook made for us. And then I can add a tag for all of them by selecting them all and then pressing notes add tags and then just call it something like lecture one. And another

useful thing is I can also help you understand research as well. So let's say you want to understand this research paper but first get a high level like 50,000 foot overview of the paper before diving deep into it. You can just copy the URL for this paper and then go to import again and then choose website and then paste in the URL and press insert. And I will import the Alex net paper. And then I can also import this YouTube video as well. So I can press copy link address over here and then go here and then press YouTube paste a YouTube URL and then because Google also own YouTube I can easily fetch the data from YouTube as well. Anyway I have two resources about Alex net. I can press the discover more resources and then say I want to understand the Alex net paper better and what it led onto and then just press submit and then it will find more resources for us and you can see it found a YouTube video. It can it found another PDF. It found some other web pages and papers. I can just press import and just wait for them to finish importing and then I can either make a study guide out of this or I can make another deep dive conversation between two hosts by pressing generate over here. But I've already hit my daily limit of I think it's about five daily audio overviews. So I would recommend using this every day for your studies so you can make the most of everyday's limit. So instead I can just say can you provide an overview of Alexet and what it led onto. Press enter and then it will go through all the resources and then use citations as well for what it led on to. And after about a minute it just gave me a nice overview of everything with all these resources and places where I got the information from. And if I click on any of these sources, then it actually takes me to the source and that particular part of the source that it came from. And then finally at the end, I can just press save to note and then it will be saved for future

reference. And the final nice thing about it is that anything you use or uploads to notebook LM is not used for training their models. So it does not use any of your data which means that you can upload your own research papers or anything else that you're working on and it won't be used by Google for that particular purpose or like training their own models.