It's like having a personal tutor for your complex
ideas, available anytime. Hey everyone, welcome
to the Data and AI with Mukundan show. I'm your
host Mukundan Sankar and today we'll be talking
about Notebook LM and how it can be your newest
and your most knowledgeable teacher. So I don't
know if you've heard about Notebook LM, it's
one of the newest products by Google and so the
thing about Notebook LM is people have been using
this for podcasting. By people, I mean content
creators. However, what I wanted to talk about
today was Notebook LM can be used for something
more than podcasting. There's so much more to
just generating like AI -generated podcasts from
this tool. And that's basically the focus of
this episode. So before I even go into anything,
let me just talk about Notebook LM. What is Notebook
LM? Notebook LM is this product by Google. It's
a really cool AI -based product. So it's powered
by a really AI -powered chatbot. It's a super
advanced chatbot. And in the backend, it is using
Gemini 1 .5. So it's basically designed for research
and also for note -taking, but it excels at making
written content into audio. So basically the
key features of this product is uploading content
from various sources like web links, basically
URLs, YouTube videos, Google Docs. It can generate
audio conversations that sound like real human
dialogues, which I mentioned. And it can provide
really insightful summaries and suggest questions
based on the uploaded text or web link. So basically
any kind of text that you upload, it will suggest
questions as well based on that. So my initial
impression when I first discovered this was I
was amazed by its ability to transform blogs
into podcasts. And yeah, I mean, that is a game
changing tool for sure. So the way it works is
you have two people, a man and a woman, and they
are having a conversation. So in this conversation,
they are talking about the piece of content that
you wrote. And they are explaining it in a really
easy to understand way. So basically, they're
taking something really complex. In my case,
it was a complex blog post. And it was turning
it to something which is very easily understandable.
So I thought that was amazing how they did that.
Because I felt like, well, I couldn't have done
a better job myself. And to maybe think about
it in a more fun way, think about it like two
of your favorite podcast hosts and they are,
you know, having an espresso and just, you know,
having a casual conversation. So that's what
it sounds like. So, I mean, this kind of a game
-changing tool, I think, would be, you know,
where the podcast world is headed now. So speaking
from my personal experience, so I uploaded a
content about retrieval augmented generation.
So it's like one of my blog posts and I'll link
that in my show notes. So in this blog post,
basically what I did was I had broken down digital
augmented generation and how it can be used for
news. So basically how to generate AI summaries
and audio from the text. So for this particular
news case, which I had, I used this blog post
and I generated a conversation. So there's an
option to generate a conversation, which means
you can generate a podcast episode from a piece
of text here. And that feature felt really intuitive.
So what Notebook LM did in this use case was
it created a podcast episode from my blog post.
And it made retrieval augmented generation sound
so easy. And any 10 -year -old could probably
pick that up. So it just sounds like two experts
are having a conversation. And they're making
it very easy for even a 5 to 10 year old to understand
the conversation. It's like a general conversation
they're having and you get to be a part of that.
So what I think makes Notebook LM unique is its
audio creation capability. So basically you're
converting text into naturally sounding dialogues,
which sets it apart. And it's like turning your
Word document into a really super interesting,
super intelligent TED talk. And there's so much
education potential as well with Notebook LM.
Like I said, it makes a complex idea sound very
easy. So any complex subject that you want to
feed it, you can get like a very easy answer
from it so it's like a supplemental learning
as well in that process right like in addition
to your youtube your um google chat gpt and all
of that other um you know search tools basically
so these tools they help you to understand complex
topics as well right but this can this can be
your essential like your additional um you know
supplemental learning tool and that's something
that's something really cool so my vision is
just this basically just I know a lot of people
are talking about using notebook LM for podcasting
and that is amazing but what we should be also
thinking about is using it for learning learn
complex topics So any kind of topic that you
read online, for example, you read a research
paper and that is going above your head. It happens
a lot with me. I try to read research papers
to keep up to date in my field. But in your case,
if you're kind of similar like me, maybe you're
reading research papers, maybe you're reading
blog articles or something else online, which
you want to understand. take the content from
that page and just upload it to Notebook LM.
And you will be amazed at how it can convert
that kind of complex information into easily
digestible data. So I think that's really cool.
And it would be very educational for you. And
speaking for personal experience, it was for
me. So I hope you can feel the same about it.
Yeah, I mean, just using it for podcasting, yeah,
I'm sure we'll have a world where we just have
podcasts where just two people are talking instead
of all the amazing content creators around there.
So I hope we don't get to that place where we
just have AI -generated podcasts. I still want
to listen to actual humans, but maybe that's
just me. But I would say this, that you know
use it to benefit you just learn something new
so when you're on the go you can use this to
learn something so like i said since you're learning
uh you know complex topics maybe you can generate
a podcast but that's just for yourself um so
just play it while you're on on the go somewhere
maybe you're in your car just have it playing
on your phone or you know it's connected to your
multimedia player on your car, your Apple CarPlay
or your Android Auto or whatever. So you are
connected to that and you're listening to this
podcast generated through Notebook LM. I'm not
sure if Notebook LM is completely there yet,
but maybe they'll have a product. Right now,
I think it's in beta phase or experimental phase,
whichever. But I think when you want to learn
something, you should use Notebook LM in the
future. So that's all from me today and I look
forward to seeing you in the next one. Thanks
everyone.