Countless AI tools available now, NotebookLM remains almost one-of-a-kind. As a Google app that uses AI to help you work with your own source material — and the objects you feed it — it’s truly unparalleled. Similar tools still lack either function, polish or both, which renders this Google option unmatched, at least not yet.

NotebookLM is an AI research assistant that lets you ask questions and create deliverables from the data you feed it. Unlike a typical AI chatbot, NotebookLM relies entirely on your sources, not random information from the internet or large amounts of questionable training data.

This use of AI is valuable and necessary. For example, Matthew McConaughey said last year in a podcast that he wanted a personal LLM fed with all his books, notes and other personal information so that he can ask questions and get answers without any external influence. This is essentially what NotebookLM does.

Google first demoed what was previously known Project Tailwind at its I/O developer conference in 2023, calling it an AI-first notebook. It answers questions based on the documents it uploads and creates a study guide for the material automatically. While impressive in its own right, that’s about as basic as NotebookLM gets right now.

Since then official release in 2023, Google has given NotebookLM even more features, making it one of the best tools for learning and doing more with your data. It can be used in a variety of ways, making it flexible and attractive to anyone who uses it.

What is NotebookLM?

NotebookLM organizes your chaotic notes and allows you to extract specific threads from dense information. What’s really interesting about NotebookLM is what it can do with your source material once it’s there.

You can chat with Gemini about the material to get answers. NotebookLM can also transform your sources into unexpected end products. It can give you answers through written text or create something new, such as audio or video overviewsslide decks, study guides and more. Depending on your needs and use case, NotebookLM can be an all-in-one AI tool.

NotebookLM is useless without the sources you feed it, and this is all it takes to work its magic. It treats these sources as the only truth and bases all answers and results on these sources. It won’t scour the internet for answers. If your sources don’t have an answer to a question you’ve asked, it will tell you.

For example, I asked “What is 2 + 2?” in a Notebook with some research notes from one of my vibe coding articles. Its answer: “The given source has no information about mathematics or the sum of 2 plus 2.”

This is what sets NotebookLM apart. You are meant to provide guardrails in the app so that you can be more confident in the information that is sent back to you. AI love to lie to you when it has no answer. NotebookLM doesn’t do this, or at least not as often.

Your sources can be documents, audio files, YouTube videos, web links and more. Each time you add a new one, NotebookLM will reanalyze the entire notebook and provide a summary of the collective source. That means NotebookLM is only as good as what you feed it. Fill your notebook with bad research materials, and you will get bad results.

In its most basic form, you can ask NotebookLM specific questions based on your sources to find answers, which is great if your source material is dense and you’re trying to get a specific answer.

For example, say you’ve uploaded an entire ebook for a book report you’re working on for school, along with notes you took for class. You can ask NotebookLM to pull themes, key character motivations, and any other information based on your sources. This alone is very helpful, but it’s only a fraction of what NotebookLM can do.

Who is the best NotebookLM?

NotebookLM is for anyone looking to understand and use their data better, so there is no single “best” candidate. However, due to the large number of parts aimed at learning, I would hesitate if I did not suggest school work. That said, NotebookLM can be used for work and for personal and creative purposes and projects, so it doesn’t really make sense to set limits for it.

Common uses for NotebookLM

School material

Throw in your study notes, your homework for the day and handouts given by the teacher, and you have a complete resource that you can chat with about your subject. With a click of a button, you can create flash cards, audio or video overviews, quizzes and more to prepare for the next quiz. Not everyone learns the same way, and NotebookLM allows students to absorb knowledge on their terms with a variety of different outputs. Flash cards? Definitely. Prefer podcasts? You can then create something you can listen to to review your notes.

The podcast-like Audio Overview feature helped NotebookLM become popular. The feature allows you to do a “deep dive” in your source material with one click, and the output is a comprehensive audio with two AI hosts, both of which have personality and deliver the material in a way that is easy to understand. You can even customize what you want to the specific topic you want the hosts to discuss. Audio Overviews are easily one of the best features that NotebookLM has to offer.

Professional work

NotebookLM can be used almost as much at work and business as it can at school, and it can be used in your next big meeting or presentation. Whether you need to make talking points based on a dense report or a quick way to visualize that data in the form of a chart or slide deck, it can all be done with a click of a button on the NotebookLM studio tab.

For example, when presented with a long press release or report, I can drop it into NotebookLM and ask the chat to break down the most important aspects into a bulleted list. Then I can create a short Audio Overview, which guides it to do the same thing with only the important information. Finally, I can request a long and in-depth version of the Audio Overview, so I can dive into all the details if I want to. The last step is the most important: Always make sure to double check your sources. NotebookLM is good at delivering things, but it doesn’t get a pass on fact checking.

Creative assistant

For personal and creative endeavors, all of NotebookLM is at your disposal. If you need a writing partner or want to hear your notes, thoughts and journals given to you in the form of an audio overview, this is how you break the rules. Now with NotebookLM Nano banana as a image generatoryou can even spin up some strong visuals based on your ideas and other work that you want to better understand and use.

One of my most recent surprises for a “let’s see what happens” type of project was during the holidays when I called my aunt for a recipe. I recorded the call so I wouldn’t miss anything. Armed with a short doc of notes and the 45-minute long recording of the call, I dropped both into NotebookLM as sources so that it could generate an accurate recipe document, without issue. What surprised me was what happened when I just used the call recording as the only source and turned it into a slide deck.

NotebookLM went to town, creating a long slide deck with a ton of personality. It’s not just a recipe, either. NotebookLM captures the context of the conversation and integrates that into the slide deck. It is beautiful, cute and funny. Titled Aunt Carol’s Gumbo Gospel, it even featured an excerpt from a phone conversation, as if it knew it was perfect. “They’ll come when you get the gumbo, honey.” This is where NotebookLM can shine, in those “wildcard” moments where you don’t expect much, to be surprised.

What are the cons of NotebookLM?

NotebookLM has a lot going for it, but it’s not without its drawbacks. Google blocks you if you want to use it. That also means you use Gemini, too. And even if Google says that the information you add to NotebookLM is not used training his AI modelssome may feel a little apprehensive about using such a given tool only some data Google already has you covered.

That said, if you’re already rooted in Google services, you may have weighed the risks. But for the tech-savvy, there is an alternative called Open the Notebook. While setting it up is nowhere near as easy as accessing NotebookLM, and it can’t match it feature for feature, it’s an overall solid alternative with privacy at its core.

Notebook LM price

NotebookLM is free to use if you have a Google account. Most people will probably be satisfied with the capabilities of the free version. Heavy users looking for more sources per notebook and higher access to use Gemini can subscribe to a Google One AI planwhich provides higher usage limits, priority access to features and up to 600 sources per notebook compared to the free version’s 50.

Final thoughts

NotebookLM is an interesting concept to begin with, and it has become such a powerful AI tool that it is the best Gemini-powered product released. It’s easy to use, but it also rewards you the more you spend on it. There is nothing else like it on the market today that is not blocked in one way or another, and it receives updates and new features fairly regularly. There’s no wrong way to use it, and any feature you want it to have can be on the NotebookLM team’s to-do list.