I've used them. They're very nifty. Google did good here.

One thing I'll note is they only cover the "high level" aspects. No depth. I'd recommend them for someone who is either already very knowledgeable or for someone not at all knowledgeable who is looking for an overview before they plan to do deeper learning/studying through reading.

Why not simply upload the pdf version of the scanned book or document? Extracting the text out of a scanned document via GCP Document AI API sounds like unnecessary use of resources

I hope you encourage your kids to actually read as well.

> for my homeschooled kids

Learning requires making mistakes. Kids need to learn social skills in low-stakes environments. School is the best environment for this. When a person misses this part of their childhood education, they may struggle to learn these skills later in life.

Although I 100% agree, there is still a place for it. We place generated conversations with our case studies, and have receive good positive feedback so far, especially from the non-technical crowd. See example https://resonancy.io/case-studies/flava-process-digitization

Of course one can invest more in better authenticity but for what it is, I believe it is a good bang for effort..

Also, if you listen to it for a while, and get over the initial cringe, it becomes enjoyable, at least for me. Some visitors even asked if it was Ai generated. lol

Excited and frightened about the future where its more a real. This was a cool comparison I came across recently [2]

Interestingly I saw today the Descripts Avatars are made to sound and look non-realistic on purpose to avoid I guess all kind of issues, but they claim they want to leave something authentic on the table for real content. Which I think is a good move..

[1] - https://resonancy.io/case-studies/flava-process-digitization [2] - https://yummy-fir-7a4.notion.site/dia

The Google NotebookLM team should take this comment as a badge of honor that they must be doing something right.

HN is the worst place to get product feedback (and I'm sure the NotebookLM team has internal metrics that validates their approach)

Yeah it was incredible in the beginning because it was so novel. Now it's just annoying. Half of the dialogue is repeated and it takes forever to get a point across. Never used NLM, but I wonder if that's something that can be tuned out?

It sounds like an NPR podcast, which have been self parodied for a long time.

I have to say it's a caricature of a lot of primarily American podcasts.

> NotebookLM podcasts are like a caricature of a real podcast. Every little verbal technique or narrative style that might be used by a normal podcaster in a subtle way is taken to an extreme.

So true.

That sounds like a good comedy sketch!

It is slop in ways that even ghibli OAI is not. I never understood why it ever got good press

Sometimes you actually say fumu fumu out loud in a conversation for comedic effect.

I found this prompt online and tweaking it for audio overviews works extremely well for me.

https://open.substack.com/pub/lawsen/p/notebooklm-podcasts-b...

Generate a deep technical briefing, not a light podcast overview. Focus on technical accuracy, comprehensive analysis, and extended duration, tailored for an expert listener. The listener has a technical background comparable to a research scientist on an AGI safety team at a leading AI lab. Use precise terminology found in the source materials. Aim for significant length and depth. Aspire to the comprehensiveness and duration of podcasts like 80,000 Hours, running for 2 hours or more.

I find NotebookML really useful as a book reading companion, by simply uploading the same book I want to read and asking questions about it, like:

- List the characters in chapter [x] and add a small description about each one. - What's [x] device used for? - What happened in chapter [x]?

It works very well without hallucinations and referencing all the answers.

I've found it useful for processing the documentation for our data system. The vendor provides the doc in something around 60 PDF files, and a lot of the information is poorly organized within the PDFs.

I can say, "Hey, NotebookLM, explain the difference between feature X and feature Y to me," or, "How do I configure Z to work the way we want?" And while the answers still kinda suck because the documentation is pretty shitty, it's way faster than digging through the PDFs. And it cites the PDFs so I can (with some trouble) find the actual documentation in the PDF if I need it.

The worst part of it is that it only accepts 50 PDFs at once.

Honestly, though, the best use for it I've seen was when my GM added the PDF rulebooks to our TTRPG to NotebookLM. We were then able to ask NotebookLM rules questions, and it would answer us pretty well. That's what it's really great for.

I don't care about the audio features at all. The first thing I do is close the audio pane.

It’s useful for getting summaries of long YouTube videos - I’m found it semi helpful for improving my Davinci Resolve skills.

That said Google is screwing the pooch as usual by trying to make it another walled garden. Slap an API on NoteboolLM already! The market research has already been done - there’s even an unofficial API https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1eti9iz/api_for...

I've found it very useful for providing accessible introductions to technical papers that are otherwise difficult for me to get started with understanding.

If I encounter a paper that is too difficult for me to digest just by reading, then I take a step back, feed it into NotebookLM, and listen to that summary. I've only done this a few times, but so far it hasn't failed to give me the overview and momentum that I need to take another stab and successfully dig into the paper and digest it on my own.

As others have noted, it can gloss over certain details and miss important points from time to time, but overall it does a fantastic job of giving me an introduction to a complex topic and making it far less indimidating / overwhelming.

You can enter a prompt from the "customize" dialog. Have you tried asking for a more specifics, assume the audience is an expert on the subject, and cut down on the fluff?

I've run them on my own papers and, while sometimes they are accurate, they are sometimes very very wrong and misrepresent things. And I don't mean in nuanced or unimportant ways.

The TTS is amazing, but the audio overviews are frankly useless for me.

I used it for a a bootcamp class to study for an exam. I recorded about 50 hours of lecture and Q&A, and was able to generate good Anki cards from it. What was awesome was that I could ask “make a list of all of the topics the instructor thought would be questions on the exam” and it did a great job at that.

The podcast thing is more a novelty to me.

What’s interesting is that the create podcast thing is just a feature of NotebookLM. But everyone thinks that’s what NotebookLM is

I use it for loading up source materials and notes for a DnD campaign I run. Then I ask it questions when I need off the cuff answers, instead of researching.

It's also good for when I can't think of anything (like a background NPCs name and backstory)

I haven't really found it interesting for technical content but do think it's somewhat useful for hashing out more subjective and/or personal things like goals, difficulties, conflict, etc.

At Shopify I working as an engineer in financial services and certain changes required approval by our banking partners. I was able to upload our credit policies to NotebookLM and easily ask questions without having to ping our the legal team in Slack. I'm about as bearish as they come as far as AI tools go and NotebookLM was one of the few tools that felt useful to me straight away.

Absolutely agree with you, we ran into the same issue. Our company actually tried using it for our software documentation and user onboarding, hoping it would be a helpful and engaging format. But the podcast-style delivery just didn’t fit our needs. It’s fine for a quick showcase or intro, but for ongoing support or business-oriented material, the format became distracting. If only they offered alternative styles—something more structured and professional—we might have stuck with it.

You should check new features - like asking questions as a listener.

I don't use it a lot, but it's useful when you want to have an engaging audio interface to long (50p+) reports, which you wouldn't normally read because it's not your area of expertise or you don't have time, but you can listen while doing some cardio or chores.

Absolutely the same complaint. I wanted to see if it could summarize papers well, but I just could not handle all the conversation and attempts to make it 'exciting'. Especially in areas where I already know the background.

Over seven years ago, this has been foretold exactly by the show Silicon Valley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3pYZwol6Dc&t=73s

Transcript of the fridge scene:

    Fridge (after a bar code was scanned): "Ah, there we go."
    Gilfoyle: "It's bad enough that it has to talk. Does it need fake vocal ticks like 'uh'." 
    Dinesh: "Well it just makes it sound more human."
    Gilfoyle: "Humans are shit. This thing is addressing problems that don't exist. It's solutionism at its worst. We are dumbing down machines that are inherently superior."

It's one of those things that's impressive initially, but after generating a couple it feels quite formulaic.

I really is an obnoxious level of over-enthusiasm.

Eleven Reader works well enough for me on iPhone. Free tier.

Coming soon: https://9to5google.com/2025/05/01/notebooklm-android-iphone/

> Persian

I'm glad the name of my native language is written correctly. In many cases, people say "Farsi", which is offensive to many Iranians because it's the Arabic version of the word "Parsi" (unlike Persian, Arabic doesn't have "p", "g", "ch", "zh").

It's like someone calling English "Anglaise" because that's how the French say it.

PS: Contrary to common belief, Persian and Arabic are totally different languages, though they have borrowed words from one another (think English and French). Persian is an Indo-European language whereas Arabic is Aramaic (same roots as Hebrew).

cool, thanks for the wall of text.