The Ultimate NotebookLM HACK For Power Users!

So, I just found this new tool that is a must-have for Notebook LM Power users. It totally transforms the Notebook LM UI and adds all these new features that Google really should have included from the start. Things like searching your sources, bulk deleting, exporting your conversations, and even turning your audio overviews into an actual podcast feed. The tool is a Chrome extension called Cortex. I'll have a link for it in the description down below. Now, this video is not sponsored by Cortex, but that is an affiliate link. Use it if you want to. Don't don't want to use it. It really doesn't matter to me. I'm just making this video because I genuinely think this is a really cool product that I want you guys to know about. After you install the Chrome extension, one of the first things you're going to do with it is to actually use it to add sources to any of your notebooks. So, I found this article right here about the health benefits of saunas. So, I went ahead and created a new notebook about saunas. There's nothing inside it yet. But coming back to this article, instead of copying the link and pasting it inside of notebook LM, all I have to do is click on this Chrome extension, choose from the dropdown the notebook I want to save it to, which in this case is the one called Saunas, and click the green button. And now opening up that notebook, you can now see that source has been added. But let's say you're reading an article like this one, and you don't want to incorporate the entire article into your notebook. Let's say there's just one paragraph that you like. Well, you can highlight that paragraph, rightclick it, and click send highlight to notebook LM. And coming back to the notebook, we can see that has now been added as a note. We can see the exact text that we highlighted as well as the source URL and when it was added. But let's say you started your research inside another AI chatbot like chat GBT. So, I came in here and I searched for sauna versus steam rooms. Found some great information and I really love this. So in the past I used to copy this and then create a note inside a notebook LM. But now Cortex adds this button right here. So by clicking this will actually save this conversation to whichever notebook that I want. So I'll go ahead and select that one. And now once again you can see it added that as a note. And you can see the entire conversation right here. This also works with other AI chatbots like Gemini and Claude. Now, for social media sites, they've added a button to that as well. So, let's say you're looking around on Reddit. I found this really great post from someone that has a lot of details about the health benefits of saunas. All I have to do is click on this button right here that the Chrome extension adds. I'll go ahead and select my sauna's notebook, and that is now being added. And this also works with other social media platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn, and it even works with Google Docs. So once you've added all your sources and you come over to the notebook, you're going to notice that it looks a little bit different. There are all these new buttons here that Cortex adds. And what I love about this is that it just blends in seamlessly with the existing UI. All these new buttons look like they were here originally or that they really should have been added by Google in the first place. So first, we now have the ability to search sources. So, let's say you have a long list of sources and you just want to find a couple of them so you can just use those ones when you're actually chatting with the chatbot or maybe you just want to delete those sources. Well, all you have to do is come up to the new search bar and search for whatever it is that might narrow down the results and then it sort of filters out the other ones leaving you just the results that match. In addition to that, you can filter by different types. So PDFs, by Google Docs, by web articles, by text that you've uploaded, and by YouTube videos. You could also save any views. So if I click on save view, and just do YouTube videos for instance, then at any point I can just return back up here to the saved views, select YouTube videos, and I'll see the exact same filtered results. We also now have the ability to bulk delete, which I find super helpful. So, by clicking on this trash icon up here, you can select multiple sources and delete them. So, let's say I don't trust any sources from Wikipedia. I can just search for Wikipedia, select both of those, and then click on delete. Okay. And those are now gone. One of my favorite buttons though is this one right here, which actually syncs up all your Google Doc sources. So, if you didn't know this, if you upload a source from Google Doc, Notebook LM just takes a snapshot of it. So, if I make any changes to this, that will not be updated inside of Notebook LM. But now, all I have to do is click on this button right here, and that will instantly sync all of my Google Doc sources. There's also a download button that allows you to download some or all of your sources. So very helpful if you just want a backup of your notebook or if you ever plan on moving to a new system. And this allows you to download them in markdown, plain text, or as PDFs. And what's great

about this is that this doesn't just download the links, it actually downloads the actual information from each of the different articles or the transcripts from the YouTube videos. So you're going to get a really nice output that will then be usable no matter where you use it. Moving along to the chat in the center, you'll now notice that there are two new buttons up here that are added by Cortex, an export button and a copy button. So, by clicking on copy, that will literally just copy the entire chat onto your clipboard. With the export one, this will give you the ability to export this as markdown, HTML, plain text, PDF, whatever you want. You can preview what it'll look like right here. And there's some options in here like you can disable it so it won't show your questions or your prompts. And you can also turn off the sources. There's another thing you can do in here though, like let's say you don't want this entire conversation. You just want a couple of the answers. So at the bottom of any of the responses from Notebook LM, there's a new checkbox. So I'll check off that one. I'll check off this one. And now when I click on copy, I just copied those two. And if I click on export, I'm just going to copy down or export those two, I should say. Moving on to the right, there are two final buttons that have been added by Cortex. So, first is the prompts button. By selecting this, this actually enables you to save different prompts. If you find yourself using the same ones over and over again, just go ahead and click on new prompt. We can give this one a title, like maybe blog post. You can even do tags and then actually put in the prompt here. Then when you click on add new prompt, you'll now be able to at any point come up to prompts. Just go ahead and click on that and that will then be copied to your clipboard so that you can then paste it into the chat. And then finally under the studio section there is a new export button. This will allow you to export anything that is textbased. So I can select this one note for instance and export it as a markdown plain text or PDF. Now, before I show you the brand new dashboard that Cortex creates for you, if you're finding this helpful, make sure to hit that like button and subscribe to the channel. I'm constantly testing out new AI tools just like this one. So, if you don't want to miss out on that, definitely make sure you subscribe. So, like I said, Cortex also creates a new dashboard for you. So, if you click on the Chrome extension and click on manage notebooks, this opens up the Cortex dashboard. And this allows you to do so much stuff to organize your notebooks. There's a lot going on here. Let me show you all the cool features. So, first, the first view you're in is all notebooks. This shows you all your notebooks inside of Notebook LM. This column will have the name of the notebook, and you can hover over it and actually open up that notebook directly inside of Notebook LM. The second column shows you how many sources are inside that notebook. And just like I showed you before, how you can download the sources, you can also do that right here. The next column is for tags. I haven't really explored this yet, but I think this could be super helpful for staying organized. So, for instance, I have one right here that has a bunch of recipes for cookies. So, I can name this one recipe. And then if I have any other notebooks about recipes, I can give all those ones the same tags. You can then see the last time it was edited. And finally, we have the audio overview column right here, which I'll talk about in a couple of minutes. Another way to stay organized, and that's really what this dashboard is all about is staying organized, we also have these things called collections. So, if you have a bunch of notebooks that are all sort of related, you can go ahead and select them. And then right here, you can click where it says, actually, where is it? Right down here at the bottom. It says add to collection. I can go ahead and click on that and create a new collection. And we call this one AI. So, now over here on the left, you can see my collections. If I click on AI, I will just see those notebooks. Coming back to all notebooks, let's say there's one notebook that I just keep coming back to because it's absolutely my favorite. Well, if you click on this little bookmark icon right here, that will save it to your favorites. And there's a section for your favorites here as well. You also have the ability to see all your sources across all your different notebooks in one place. You see all of them right here. So, this is helpful because first of all, if you have bad sources, and those are basically sources that cannot be uploaded to notebook LM, instead of having to open up each individual notebook and actually finding them and deleting them, you can just come inside of Cortex, click where it says delete bad sources, and it will then delete all your bad sources and kind of clean that all up. In addition to that, let's say you have sources in one notebook that you now want to add to a different notebook, so it's actually in two different notebooks. This makes it very easy because I can just go ahead and select those sources, click add to notebook, and then add them to a new notebook. And remember, I showed you before how you can sync Google Docs

inside a single notebook. Well, at any point you can come into the Cortex workspace and actually sync your Google Docs across all your notebooks. We also have bulk import. So, this is actually really helpful because let's say you're doing a bunch of research on your own and you have a whole bunch of tabs that are open. Well, instead of having to manually copy and paste all those or coming over to each of these and clicking the Chrome extension, you can just have all those tabs open, click on browser tabs and actually select directly in here. So, you can then bring the links from all your different tabs inside of Notebook LM. There's also ways to bulk upload using a CSV or again just copy and pasting links in here. There's also these automation rules that I haven't played around with yet, but they do seem like they could be pretty powerful. So, basically, let's say you can set one up where anytime it's added to a certain collection, it will automatically add a tag. Or anytime it adds a tag, it will automatically create an audio overview for it. Different stuff like that. And speaking of audio overviews, this is the last thing I want to show you. If we come back to all notebooks, we have a column here for audio overviews. So, anytime you've generated an audio overview for one of your notebooks, it's going to appear in this column. And you can listen to it directly in here or actually download it directly from here as well. But if you haven't made one yet for that notebook, you can do that directly inside of here. Just click on this and this will allow you to actually generate the audio. But this takes things one step further and does something really cool with audio overviews. So, here on the left, you see this podcast section. This allows you to create a new podcast feed. I have one right here called Paul's podcast feed. And anytime I create a new audio overview, I come over into my Cortex workspace. I find that audio overview like this one right here. Click on the plus icon and actually select Paul's podcast feed. Go ahead and edit. And now this actually downloads the podcast episodes to my iPhone, to my Apple Watch, because I've actually subscribed to this podcast. Paul's podcast feed is now a podcast show and these are individual episodes that are being downloaded to my iPhone. Let's talk about pricing. So Cortex does have a free plan. There are limitations on it and you can't use all of the different features, but it'll give you like some idea of how Cortex works. And then if you want to sign up for the paid plan, it starts at just $2. 40 a month if you go with the yearly subscription, which really isn't that bad at all in my opinion. Or if you pay monthtomonth, it's just $4. 99. Best of all though, they do have a pay once own it forever plan that's just $49 and that does include all future updates. So yeah, if you want to try it out for yourself, again, I'll have a link for this in the description down below. So, that's Cortex, kind of my dream tool as a Notebook LM power user. If you want to check it out, I'll have a link for it in the description. And if you want to see more ways to get the most out of Notebook LM, check out this video right here. This is where I cover some of the advanced things that I've learned that you can do with Notebook LM. So, definitely click on this video and I'll see you over there in just one second. Bye for now.