One thing that intrigued me about recent reviews of generative AI products is that they promise some amazing result ‘in minutes’. With the right prompting, you can have AI create a website ‘in minutes’ or a slideshow presentation ‘in minutes’. In one of the video reviews for Google’s NotebookLM, someone promised the creation of a talk show ‘in minutes’. That’s right, given some inputs for a chosen topic, NotebookLM could generate a talk show on that topic. In minutes. Now this I had to see(hear).

NotebookLM: A First Glance

NotebookLM was released in 2023, it was is billed as a learning tool: “Understand Anything - Your research and thinking partner”. So you give it some inputs on a given topic in the form of URLs, PDFs and so on, and NotebookLM can generate summaries of the topic, based on those inputs. The output can be simply a text summary in the form of a blog post, but it can also be a video explainer(!). Or a talk show. This is what intrigued me most out of all the outputs, because the AI would have to generate a conversation and banter between two characters, and make it flow.

Getting Started

NotebookLM is billed as a learning tool, but to kick the tyres, I decided to test it on a topic I already knew a lot about: me! I chose the inputs to be my websites over the years, some current, some that have been defunct for over a decade:

For good measure, I also added a website that included a significant musical achievement: being in the top 10 (jazz category) in a 2005 songwriting contest.

Entering these inputs was straightforward, start with clicking ‘Create new notebook’:

Create new notebook

Then, click ‘Add sources’ and enter the URLs in.

Add sources button

Add sources window

OK maybe not so straightforward, with my LinkedIn, it complained that it didn’t have access (because it couldn’t sign in). No worries, I only wanted it to access the ‘About’ section anyway, so I simply copy-pasted that text into ‘Copied text’.

And… Go…

Now that the inputs are there, it’s time for the output. There’s a myriad of options:

Output options

But I went straight to the one that intrigued me the most, the talkshow (NotebookLM calls it ‘Deep Dive’, under ‘Audio’). HOT TIP: if you’re trying this at home, like me, you’ll excitedly click the ‘Audio’ button. Don’t! Make sure you click the pen icon inside the button, that way you get options to tailor the Audio.

Now when someone says ‘in minutes’ I usually interpret this to be under 10 minutes. If something took 11 minutes, I don’t believe one can say that it took ‘minutes’. As promised, the talk show was generated in about 8 minutes.

The Results

So what do you think?

I was quite impressed, an AI generated talk show about myself! While billed as a learning tool, it turns out that Notebook LM is quite good for encouraging people who wonder what they have been doing with their lives 😅. I decided to go all out and put it on SoundCloud, along with a matching tacky thumbnail image. AI generated, of course. Funny, the most time-consuming part of this whole process was generating the thumbnail image, prompting, refining, prompting again, refining again.

Didi Mudigdo · The Deep Dive (Anne Irving & Adam Ingram): Didi Mudigdo

Conclusion

What I just did would more appropriately be classed as ‘party trick’. However, it does illustrate the capabilities of NotebookLM. The non-learning possible uses are endless, just have a look on YouTube to see what people are doing with it. Some are even using it to generate monetisable content, e.g. finding book summaries that are in demand, getting NotebookLM to summarise it (text, audio or video), and then sell it. I hope this has got you interested in trying it out, if you already have a Google account, just go to notebooklm.google.com.