How to Use NotebookLM Better Than 99% of Users: Tutorial for Beginners

Notebook might be the most slept on AI tool Google has ever released. Most people treat it like a chatbot. Upload a PDF, ask a vague question, get a vague answer, close the tab. That's like buying a Tesla, and only using it to charge your phone. Here's what they're missing. Notebook is a full research intelligence system. finds sources for you, validates them, turns them into podcasts, videos, infographics, slide decks, and it does it grounded in your actual data, not hallucinations. I've broken this down into complete workflow that changes how you work with information. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly how to use every feature at a level that puts you ahead of 99% of users. So, let's go. First

I'll head over to the Notebook LM website. On the homepage, you'll see your notebook list. If you've created any before or an empty state if this is your first time, we can create a new notebook here. But before we do, here's a critical detail that often gets overlooked. Notebooks should be topic specific. Don't trade a notebook called research or general notes. Trade focused notebooks like competitive analysis Q1 2025 or AI video generation research. That might seem insignificant, but it actually matters because Notebook LM performs better when sources are related and focused on a single topic or project. I'll go ahead and create a new notebook here by pressing this plus icon. This immediately takes you to the source upload screen. This is where the

quality of your output gets decided. The common mistake here is simply uploading one or two files without thinking strategically about what sources you actually need. Instead, take a step back. Think about the complete information landscape for your topic. What formats does your information exist in? PDFs, YouTube videos, websites, Google Docs. The power of Notebook LM comes from combining multiple formats and sources, creating a web of information rather than just a stack of isolated documents. And later in this video, I'll show you exactly how to professionally execute that multiformat strategy. So, make sure you stick around for that. For this example

I'm going to create research notebook on AI video generation trends. Let me title this AI video generation research 2026. Now, here's a feature that was added quite recently, which is deep research source discovery. Previously, there was only fast research, which was good, but limited. Now you can access a much more powerful agent by clicking this drop-down arrow and selecting deep research. So I'm going to select that and write AI video generation models and trends 2026. Hit submit. And here's what happens. Notebook LM launches an agentic AI tool that autonomously researches your topic. It doesn't just do keyword matching like a basic search. It actually analyzes the topic, finds sources, evaluates them, adapts its search strategy to fill gaps, and generates a comprehensive research report. This means deep research will discover around 50 sources related to your topic. It generates a detailed research report synthesizing those sources. Then it selects the most relevant sources and imports them directly into your notebook. What you get is both a curated research report and high-quality sources already loaded and ready to work with. And that matters a lot because most people spend hours manually searching for sources, evaluating quality, and uploading them one by one. Deep research does that work in minutes and often find sources you wouldn't have discovered manually. Okay, you've got camera shots, angles, and movement combos down. But here's something I've been testing lately. What if you need a specific 3D object or character that doesn't exist yet? Like you want to generate video of a custom product, unique creature, or a branded item for your client. Meshi is an AI tool that generates 3D models from text or image prompts. You type a description and you get a usable 3D model in minutes. Meshi 6 is their newest model and the quality jump is noticeable. Sculpting level detail, richer surface info, and sharper edges. The texturing also got an upgrade in December. Cleaner, more complete textures and better text rendering. If you're working on game assets, design, animation, or 3D printing, it exports cleanly to real pipelines like Blender and Unreal. You can also use features like Prompt Helper to speed up iterations. They're offering 50% off for new users. No code needed. I've pinned the link in the top comment and also added it to the video description. worth checking out if you need faster AI 3D workflows. All right, it's finished. Now

I have curated list citations imported automatically, plus full research report that's also added as a source. Scrolling down, you'll notice some sources might fail to import if they are behind pay walls. There is a remove all failed sources button that cleans those up in one click instead of deleting them individually, which I'm going to do right now. Now, I have a strong foundation of sources to work with. Before we start asking questions or generating content, here's a step that gets skipped nine times out of 10, which is source validation. Notebook LM is extremely good at reducing hallucinations because it grounds everything in your sources. But that only works if your sources are reliable and current. outdated, biased toward one perspective, or mixing primary research with opinion pieces, Notebook LM will give you answers based on flawed information without distinguishing between them. So, here's the validation framework I use for every single notebook. Go to the chat interface in the center of the screen. Before asking any topic questions, I run through these checks. First, I ask create a table showing each source with its publication date, author credentials, and whether it's a primary source, secondary analysis, or opinion piece. This gives me a clear view of what I'm actually working with. If I see that most of my sources are from 2020 or earlier on a fastmoving topic like AI, I know I need newer material. If everything is opinion pieces with no primary research, that's a problem. Let me ask that now. Notebook LM is generating a table analyzing all of the sources. I can immediately see the spread, when these were published, who wrote them, what type of source each one is. In this case, I'm seeing a good mix of recent research papers, industry reports, and technical documentation. Most of them are pretty recent, just what I want for current AI video generation research. Second, I ask which of these sources are most frequently cited or referenced by other sources in this notebook. This shows me which sources are foundational to the topic versus which ones are peripheral. The highly cited sources are usually the ones I should prioritize when I'm filtering sources later. And third, I ask, summarize the primary perspective or bias of the top five most substantial sources. This tells me whether I'm looking at this topic from multiple angles or whether all my sources share the same viewpoint. For controversial or evolving topics, you want diverse perspectives. For technical documentation, perspective matters less. These three checks take about 5 minutes total, but they give me a complete picture of my source quality before I build my entire workflow on top of it. With our sources

validated, the next critical step is configuration. This is something the vast majority of users ignore, but it dramatically improves response quality. In the top right corner, click right here. This opens settings that control how Notebook LM responds to you. First, set your conversational goal. You have three options. Default for general research, learning guide for educational content, or custom for specific use cases. For this research notebook, I'm choosing custom, and I'll define the role as research analyst focused on AI video generation models and industry trends. This tells notebook LM to frame all responses from that perspective instead of giving generic answers. Next, choose response length. You have default, longer, or shorter. For research work, I typically choose longer because I want detailed analysis, not brief summaries. Click save. These settings now apply to every chat in this notebook. You set them once and forget about them, but they shape every interaction from this point forward. The majority of people use notebooks in default mode and wonder why responses feel generic. Configured settings give you targeted, specific answers optimized for your exact use case. Now, let's look at how to work with sources

strategically instead of just accepting all the sources for every query. On the left side, you'll see your source list with checkboxes next to each file. And a very common mistake that people make is that they leave everything checked all the time. When you ask a question with all of the sources selected, notebook LM tries to synthesize an answer from every single document. This dilutes your results. It forces the AI to generalize, giving you a vague surface level summary instead of a deep answer. So, let's say I want to focus specifically on technical implementation details. If I leave marketing case studies and opinion pieces checked, I'm confusing the model by forcing it to look at conflicting types of content. So, I'm going to uncheck everything. Then, I'll go through and select only the three technical papers that contain actual implementation details and model architecture. Now effectively the other documents do not exist to the AI. It can only see what is checked. When I ask how do these models handle motion consistency notebook LM creates the answer exclusively from those three technical papers. The answer comes out sharper, more technical and completely free of irrelevant information. This gives you surgical control over your research. You can keep one massive master notebook with 50 sources, but by toggling these checkboxes, you can instantly turn it into focused subnotebook for any specific query. All

right, now let's generate some content from our sources. We'll start with an audio overview, which is one of Notebook LM's signature features. On the right side, you'll see the studio panel. Click on audio overview. Now, don't just click generate yet. Most people just blindly hit generate and accept whatever random conversation the AI spits out. If you want a result you can actually use for work, you need to take control of the conversation first. In the instruction input box below is where you tell notebook LM exactly what to focus on, what tone to use, and how long the overview should be. For this research notebook, I don't need a balanced overview of all the sources covering every aspect of AI video generation. I need the podcast to focus specifically on the key technical breakthroughs and industry adoption challenges we identified earlier. So I'll write focus exclusively on the main technical breakthroughs in AI video generation models in 2026 and the key challenges for industry adoption. Explain each breakthrough clearly and keep the discussion under 15 minutes. Use accessible language avoiding unnecessary jargon. Above the instruction box, you have two critical settings which are format and length. For format, you aren't limited to the standard deep dive option. You can switch to brief if you need a quick summary or select critique, which essentially turns the AI into strict editor that reviews your material for gaps and weaknesses. But since our prompt is specifically asking to uncover breakthroughs and challenges, I'm actually going to switch this to debate. This instructs the hosts to actively illuminate different perspectives rather than just having a friendly chat. For length, you can choose short or default. I'll keep this on default, which usually gives us a solid 10-minute discussion, perfect for digging into the details without broadening the topic too much. Now, click generate. Notebook LM will take a few minutes to create a custom podcast with two AI hosts discussing your sources based on those specific instructions. The difference between default audio and customized audio is massive. The default version covers everything equally. The customized version becomes a targeted research brief focused on exactly what you need to understand. And here's a pro tip. Do not hesitate to regenerate. Think of the first pass as a rough draft. If it came out too technical, regenerate it with instructions to simplify the language. If it wasted time on background history, tell it to cut the intro and focus only on current developments. Most people generate once and just accept whatever they get. But the top users iterate on these instructions until the output matches their specific research goals perfectly. While that audio overview is generating, this is actually a perfect time to talk about where I do all my AI work, and that's on AI Master Pro. Look, if you're serious about mastering AI tools like Notebook LM, you need a place that brings everything together. AI Master Pro gives you access to all the major AI models in one platform. Gemini, Sora, VO, Nano Banana Pro, Clang without watermarks and without juggling multiple subscriptions. But it's not just about the tools. AI Master Pro has over 190 structured lessons that teach you exactly how to use these tools like a pro. You're not just getting access to AI models. You are getting complete education system with hands-on practice. The AI master chat features like having a personal tutor available 24/7. It knows every lesson, helps you craft better prompts, and even quizzes you to test your understanding. And the prompt lab gives you access to over 300 professional prompts across every category, content, marketing, business strategy, automation, everything. And the best part, you can actually earn money from your AI creations. Generate images or videos in the AI studio. Publish them to the community and earn tokens when others download your work. It's not just learning, it's building a skill that pays. Right now, we're offering 30% off the annual plan. There's a 7-day money back guarantee. So, if you want to level up while you're learning notebookm, head over to amaster. me and start your free trial. No credit card link below. Let's create visual

content using another brand new feature on Notebook LM which is infographic generation part by Nano Banana Pro. Just Google this advanced image generation model. To access that, click infographic in the studio panel. You'll see three main settings to configure here. First is orientation where you can choose landscape, portrait or square. Next is level of detail which ranges from concise to detailed. And finally, you have the custom instruction field. For most use cases, I recommend standard detail level and landscape orientation. The detailed option can introduce minor text errors with complex topics and concise sometimes oversimplifies. In the instruction field, I'll write create a professional infographic mapping the evolution of AI video generation models from 2024 to 2026 showing key milestones and technical capabilities. Use a clean design with blue and gray color scheme. Hit generate. This will take a couple of minutes and what comes back is a fully designed infographic pulling information directly from your sources including charts, diagrams, text hierarchies, visual layouts, everything you'd normally need a designer to create. The quality is legitimately publication ready. Minor spelling errors can appear in detailed mode with complex topics, but standard mode is consistently accurate. All right, here's the result. This is a clean, well-designed visual representation of AI video generation model evolution with key milestones mapped to different years. The design is professional. The information is accurate and cited from my sources and this would have taken hours to create manually. You can also regenerate this with different instructions if you want to adjust the style or focus. Now, Nanto Banana Pro inside Notebook Lam is great for infographics, but if you want to use it for standalone image generation, full 4K output, no watermarks, up to eight reference images, you can access it directly in AA Master's Studio, way more control than what NotebookM gives you

here. Next, let's create a presentation deck, which is the other new Nano Banana Pro feature. In the Studio panel, click Slide Deck. You'll see two deck types. Detailed deck, which creates comprehensive slides with full text suitable for sending as a standalone document, or presenter slides, which creates clean visual slides with minimal text designed to support you while speaking. For most presentations, presenter slides is better because it keeps slides visual and text minimal. For length, you have two main choices. short for a 10 slide summary or default for a full 15 to 20 slide deck. I want just the key points, so I'm going to choose short. In the instruction field, I'll write create a presentation explaining the three main AI video generation platforms in 2026 for a technical audience. Focus on key differences, capabilities, and use cases. Click generate. This will take a few minutes to create a fully designed slide deck. While it's generating, let me explain why this is powerful. Most people spend hours building presentations from research. They read through sources, extract key points, design slides, find or create visuals, and structure the narrative. Notebook LM does all of that automatically. It pulls information from your sources, structures it logically, designs professional slides, and creates supporting visuals. And just like audio overviews, you can regenerate with different instructions if the first version isn't quite right. All right, the deck is ready. Let's take a look. This is a clean, professionally designed presentation. Each slide has a clear visual hierarchy, supporting graphics and text pulled directly from my sources with proper structure. Slide one introduces the topic. Slide two breaks down the three main platforms. Each subsequent slide explores one platform in detail with visuals that illustrate the key concepts. This is presentation ready output that would normally take several hours to build manually generated in minutes from your sources. The audio overview we generated earlier should be ready now. So, let's open it. You'll see a standard podcast player with two AI hosts discussing AI video generation based on our custom instructions. Let me play a bit of it. — I think the industry has largely mitigated exposure bias with better training data. Though, — you can't train away a structural flaw. Audio is great for understanding the big picture, but for precision work, we need the chat interface. In the center panel

you can ask any question about your sources. The key is asking precise questions instead of vague ones. Instead of asking, "What does this say about AI video generation, ask compare the three main technical approaches to motion consistency in AI video models? " And explain the key trade-off each approach makes. That specific question gets you a structured, useful answer. You'll also notice little numbers scattered through the text. Those are citations. When you click one, it highlights the exact passage in the original document, letting you verify the accuracy of the text instantly. But if you need

something more engaging than just audio, there's the video overview. This just got a major upgrade with custom visual styles. In the studio panel, click video overview. This creates a narrated explainer video with AI generated visuals based on your sources. It's similar to audio overview but with slideshow style visuals that illustrate the concepts as they're explained. You'll see two content options. Explainer, which creates a comprehensive overview connecting concepts from your sources, or brief, which gives you a quick bite-size summary of core ideas. For most use cases, explainer is better because it provides depth and proper context. Below is an option to choose custom visual styles powered by Nano Banana Pro. You can choose auto select to let Notebook LM pick a style from their preset library. Or you can choose custom and describe your own visual aesthetic. Let me try custom. I'll write clean modern design with blue and white color scheme, minimalist graphics, and professional typography. You can also guide what the AI host should focus on in the instruction field. Similar to audio overviews, click generate. This takes a few minutes to create the full video with narration, visuals, and transitions. All right, it's finished processing. Let's play a quick clip to see how it handled our custom design request. And look at that. It didn't just grab random stock footage. It actually followed my prompt for a clean blue and white color scheme with minimalist graphics. The narration is synced perfectly with the visuals and the structure follows the logical flow of our source documents. This is perfect for creating educational content, presentation materials, or sharable explanations of complex research. All

right, let's wrap up the studio panel by looking at the remaining tools, which are reports, flashcards, quiz, and mind maps. These are all found in the studio panel on the right, and each serves a specific organizational purpose. Let's start with reports. Click reports, and you'll see several options here. The first one we're going to look at is the briefing dock. This creates several pages of executive summary of your entire knowledge base featuring key insights and quotes from your sources. And I'll click to generate one now. And here's the result. This is a clean, professionally structured document summarizing the key findings from all of the sources. I can export this to Google Docs, edit it if needed, and use it as a foundation for reports or presentations. But here's the feature a lot of people miss. You aren't limited to these defaults. You can click create your own to specify the exact structure, style, and tone you want. Let's try that. I'll write create a technical white paper analyzing the three main approaches to motion consistency in AI video models written for researchers include methodology comparison and future research directions. Hit generate and look at this result. Unlike the generic breathing dog, this is highly technical. It actually followed my structure. It gave me the specific methodology comparison in the future direction section I asked for. This essentially did 90% of the drafting work in seconds. Next, you have flashcards and quiz sections. Flash cards generate quick Q& A pairs for memorization while the quiz tool builds a full interactive test. The value here is that they pull directly from your sources. So, you aren't testing yourself on general knowledge. You're testing yourself on the specific data you just uploaded. And finally, there's the mind map. If you click this, notebook LM generates an interactive diagram showing how the key concepts in your sources actually connect to each other. You can click any note to expand it into subtopics or click it again to trigger a detailed chat response about that specific idea. This is massive for visual learners because it helps you spot connections between files that you would definitely miss just by reading them linearly. And that is the key takeaway here. It is a mistake to limit yourself to just the chat and audio overview. These organizational tools are what actually transform raw information into a structured knowledge system. Now

to bring this full circle, I want to deliver on that promise I made at the start of the video. We need to talk about source strategy, specifically how to mix different formats to create a truly comprehensive research system. The vast majority of users upload one type of source. Maybe they add five PDFs or maybe they add three YouTube videos, but they don't think strategically about combining formats. Here's what you should do. Notebook LM accepts PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs, and plain text. The power comes from mixing these formats to cover your topic from multiple angles. For example, in this notebook, I can layer YouTube lectures for accessible explanations on top of company blog posts for industry perspective and even add podcast transcripts for conversational insight. This creates a 360° view of the topic that you just can't get from a single file type. Let me add a YouTube video to demonstrate. Click add source. Click YouTube and paste a video URL. I'm adding a technical breakdown of Sora 2 from a recent AI conference. Notebook LM pulls the transcript and adds it as a source. Now I can ask questions that synthesize across formats. Compare the technical approaches discussed in the research papers with the practical concerns raised in the YouTube lecture. Notebook LM will analyze both the written research and the video transcript and create a synthesis you couldn't get by analyzing each format separately. This multi-format approach is especially powerful because different formats offer different value. Academic papers give you rigor. Videos give you accessible explanations. Blog posts give you industry context. Podcasts give you conversational insights. The typical user stays within one format. While advanced users strategically mix every format to build comprehensive knowledge

bases. Let me give you some real world use cases that show how powerful this system is when you actually use it. Right. Students, imagine you're preparing for an exam on AI ethics. You upload your course PDFs, add YouTube lectures from your professor, include relevant research papers, and even add podcast episodes discussing real world case studies. Then use the quiz feature to test yourself, the flashcards for memorization, and the mind map to see how concepts connect. — That's a complete study system in one place. Project managers, you're working on a new product launch. You upload meeting notes, project plans, competitor analysis reports, and precedent documents from similar launches. You use the briefing dock to create an executive summary for stakeholders. And you use the chat to answer specific questions like, "What were the key learnings from our last product launch? " Researchers, you're analyzing the AI video generation market. You use deep research to automatically gather 50 sources, validate them for recency and credibility, filter by technical papers when you need implementation details, and generate a custom audio overview that focuses only on competitive dynamics. Then you create an infographic for your presentation and a slide deck for your client meeting. Recruiters, you're preparing for a series of interviews. You upload the candidates resume, your interview rubrics, company guidelines, and job description. You ask notebook LM to generate interview prep questions specific to this candidate's background and you use the chat to quickly reference answers during the interview itself. The difference between someone who uses Notebook LM as an amateur and someone who use it at a professional level isn't just knowing these features exist. It's following the complete workflow from source discovery through validation, configuration, content generation, and organization. So, if you found this video valuable, you should check out my other videos on mastering Google's AI tools. I've got deep dives on Gemini 3. 0, VO, and the complete Google AI ecosystem. You'll see that these strategies like source validation, strategic prompting, and multi-format thinking don't just work in Notebook. They're the secret to getting the most out of every AI tool you use. And if you're serious about leveling up your skills, AI skills, don't forget to check out AI Masterp Pro at a master. me. 30% off annual plan, 7-day money back guarantee, and everything you need to master AI in one place. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.