This AI Does My Research

We know this from school all to well: digesting long texts with notes is cumbersome.

But it didn’t end there. It was just a preview of what would plague (or bless) us later in life.

The research never stops.

And I don’t mean discovering the cure for cancer. I mean “practical” stuff such as marketing, reports, plans etc.

NotebookLM from Google is designed exactly for that. And it’s by far the easiest and best AI tool out there.

It feels like a workbench for processing various kinds of information and research. It can be anything, it’s not limited to scholar work.

You can upload your own documents, books, papers, websites, etc. And it’s connected to the internet, so you can do research there, too – like with Perplexity.

But it really shines when you upload your own lengthy documents. To quote the website: “marketing plans, course reading, research notes, meeting transcripts, sales documents, etc.”

It brings them all together into one combined knowledge base that you can work on as you would by taking notes on a notebook. That’s probably where the name comes from 🤔

It basically learns this knowledge base (probably through RAG) and you can query and modify it as you wish.

Here I uploaded the recent AI 2027 prediction report:

The workflow is straightforward:

1. Upload sources (“sources”, left pane)

2. Work through them via natural language in the chat (central pane)

3. Add your thoughts and take the conclusions + work through the material on the right in the “studio”

It’s enormously helpful with generating common note formats, like a study guide, FAQ, a timeline, and you can add your own notes as well.

And it’s got even a mindmap:

It’s a great place if you have various disparate data sources and formats about the same topic that you want to bring together to draw some conclusions about. Plus it connects to your G-Drive.

You could probably achieve the same with a well-prompted custom GPT or via Deepseek/Perplexity, but the interface and the visual space give way to your creations and thoughts much easier.

Instead of getting a one-time full-fledged report from Deepseek, NotebookLM allows you to massage the data. It feels like a crossbreed between Google Docs, Keep (notes), Search, and Gemini (Gen AI). Then you can convert them into sources, too.

Oh, and have I mentioned the podcast generation feature?

It’s still in the testing phase, but this feature alone could blow up on it’s own.

You can generate a complete podcast episode and listen to it. The voice generation is incredible, it’s indistinguishable from two people talking in a podcast.

It’s very powerful for books. You can basically listen to a smart summary. The topics picked and the way they are discussed are very well done even from a long text such as a book. I’ve recently finished Tim Ferriss’ “The Four Hour Workweek”, and then listened to the generated podcast. The topics really hit the nerve and bring the most important concepts home. Including the intonation, which is essential for the spoken word.

NotebookLM will probably be a serious contender to platforms such as Blinkist, provided you’ve already purchased a copy of the book, as you need to upload it.

But if you really want to learn and understand something, the old-school way is still essential.

NotebookLM It doesn’t do away with the fact that you need to work through the material yourself in order to understand it.

Imagine having used this at uni or school. Would you have learned as much as you know today? Probably not. Because learning is thinking through the material and flipping it on all sides in your head. The mind is a muscle, it needs this training.

Schooling/education shapes a certain way of thinking that can’t be learned by jumping straight into these tools. Meaning: you can’t use it effectively if you don’t know how to think on different abstraction levels at the same time.

I see NotebookLM’s use-case in accelerating the quick absorption of knowledge in areas where you might not be very proficient. It aids you in taking decisions quickly with limited information. It’s an accelerator in this sense, because we live in a very busy world, so we don’t have time to dive deep into a topic. It removes the grind and lets us stay at the high level.

It can be used most meaningfully by someone who already has lots of general knowledge and is a real expert in one or a few domains. In both cases it helps you make decisions much faster, surfacing the most important points and presenting them in an easily digestible way.

Fields and professions that could benefit from it the most? Most probably legal, medical, academia, literature, writing, marketing … Plus people who give lots of different presentations (paired with Gamma App to generate the slides with AI).

NotebookLM is another great example of a tool that disrupts a field by giving a 10x boost in productivity.

And as with any other Generative AI tool, it widens the gap between the knowledgeable and the not knowledgeable. It’s an accelerator. It pours fuel into the fire. If your fire is small, the 10x of nothing is still nothing. But if you pour it into a campfire, it’s almost an explosion.

Knowledge, skill, and trained intelligence are now more important than ever.