School isn’t easy. If you’re like most students, you probably feel like you need all the help you can get, especially when it comes time to sit down for exams that can potentially make or break your future.
But maybe study groups, tutors, TA sessions, and online study guides just aren’t working for you. Maybe you want to try self-guided study. In that case, you now have another option: NotebookLM.
NotebookLM is Google’s experimental AI-powered note-taking and research assistant app. It’s like ChatGPT except it trains itself on the documents you feed it, becomes an expert on those subjects, and then in turn helps you with those subjects.
If you want to distill a complex topic down to its core elements in a digestible way, NotebookLM is great for that. It’s the AI version of a TL;DR and can be helpful if you’re studying for an exam. Here’s what it can do and how you can take advantage of it.
Organize your study materials into notebooks to help you focus
Dave Parrack / IDG
With NotebookLM, you can upload up to 50 different sources of information per notebook, so as a student you’ll want to make sure you’re using different notebooks for each thing you want to study.
By importing study notes from lectures, essays, and other source material related to a specific subject, you can sort your study materials into helpful groupings. For info-dense courses, you may even want to split the course into several notebooks, one for each topic of the semester.
Say, for example, you’re majoring in Computer Science. You can create separate notebooks for each course: one for the history of computing, one for Assembly, one for PC hardware, one for networking, one for artificial intelligence, etc. To do this, just click + New notebook and add source material from your course to the notebook.
Summarize study materials to make them more digestible
Dave Parrack / IDG
Once you’ve uploaded your study materials, NotebookLM can create summaries to make it all more digestible — and the more digestible they are, the more likely you are to understand them.
Sure, it’s still important to read all the material in its source form, and it’s still important to write or type out notes, essays, and other coursework yourself. But once you’ve done that, the AI-generated summaries in NotebookLM can help you absorb the core ideas.
What’s nice is that NotebookLM automatically does this for you. After uploading materials, the app comes up with summaries for each of the sources. You can break this down further by only selecting a single source and asking NotebookLM to summarize what that’s talking about, then narrowing things even further by asking for a deeper dive.
Create a study guide with practice questions and flashcards
Dave Parrack / IDG
You no longer have to create and maintain your own study guides ahead of your exams. Instead, you can ask NotebookLM to create them based on your uploaded materials, complete with practice questions to help you prepare for the real test ahead of you.
You can also ask it to create flashcards containing the key terms related to the subject you’re studying, along with their definitions.
To do this, make sure you’ve populated your notebooks with all of the relevant sources. Then, simply ask NotebookLM to create a study guide. If you want practice questions included, just say that. And the same goes for flashcards that can aid you in your memorization.
Ask NotebookLM to explain and clarify confusing concepts
Dave Parrack / IDG
Even with all of the above, you’ll likely still come across confusing concepts that you struggle to grasp. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a free, on-demand tutor who could explain those things to you? Well, NotebookLM is the next best thing.
Simply ask NotebookLM to explain any concept you don’t fully understand and it’ll generate a simplified — but still helpful — explanation of that very thing. Oftentimes, just having something explained in a slightly different way can make all the difference.
You can phrase your questions to ask what particular terms mean or who particular people are or how particular principles work. NotebookLM will scour your uploaded sources and use the info within as the basis for its explanations. If something sounds off, ask for further revisions.
Be quizzed on your study materials to check your progress
Dave Parrack / IDG
Once you’ve studied a certain subject enough, to the point where you feel confident in it, you can check your progress with a quiz generated by NotebookLM. This will help you identify your strong points and weak points, allowing you to adjust your studying sessions accordingly.
Simply say to NotebookLM: “Ask a set of questions to help me check my progress.” It should come up with a list of fitting questions based on your uploaded materials. You can also ask NotebookLM to ask increasingly more difficult questions as you near exam time.
Create an audio overview “podcast” to hear the subject dissected
Dave Parrack / IDG
Audio Overview is the most recently added feature to NotebookLM as of this writing, and it’s so cool that it has gone viral. It essentially creates an AI-generated “podcast” from your source materials, with two virtual hosts discussing the subject out loud.
It’s a very digestible way of understanding any complex subject because the podcast medium is inherently digestible. And if this AI-generated podcast stirs up more questions than answers, you can go right back to asking NotebookLM questions and getting clarifications.
To create an Audio Overview, look for Audio Overview in the upper-right corner of the app. You can either Generate an Audio Overview based on all of the selected sources, or Customize it by suggesting specific subjects for the hosts to focus on. Once it’s generated, you’ll have a nifty podcast-like discussion of whatever it is you’re studying.
Use NotebookLM as an AI study partner
Dave Parrack / IDG
Last but not least, NotebookLM can be your study partner — someone to bounce ideas off, to share knowledge with, to help reinforce what you’re learning so you retain it.
Students have been using study partners for decades, and now NotebookLM can fill in as a virtual study partner in a pinch. Despite it being an AI, it can also prevent you from feeling alone and isolated while churning through masses of study material on your own.
There are no specific instructions here. You just need to think of NotebookLM as your study partner and converse with it accordingly. Whatever you would ask a human study partner, you can also ask this artificial intelligence equivalent.
NotebookLM will be able to offer insights you may have missed, suggest areas to focus on next, and act as a foil for any questions you have. The only thing lacking is that human touch and emotional support.
Further reading: How ChatGPT improved my life this year
Author: Dave Parrack, Contributor, PCWorld
Dave Parrack has been writing about technology since 2007. He has also been an editor, covering consumer tech news and seeking to help people better understand the devices and services they use daily. He has bylines at MakeUseOf, SlashGear, and New Atlas, and has produced thousands of articles in a long and varied career. He uses Windows (somewhat begrudgingly), but actually prefers his Chromebook. He thinks AI may just change the world, but hasn't yet decided if it will be for the better or worse.