Listen and Learn

Find out how Google is creating tools that accelerate and personalize education for students across the country.

Hidden among the headline-stealing AI announcements of 2023, Google released a smaller but highly valuable product: NotebookLM. While ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic, and Grok continue to develop and release stronger general models, able to tackle more complex and highly detailed questions, the benefits to the average individual have only slightly increased. NotebookLM, however, is directed at assisting the average person with enhanced educational and highly personalized learning tools in a myriad of formats. Most notably, it can create custom “explainer” podcasts and narrated YouTube videos within minutes.

Here’s the simple rundown. The tool acts as an in-house, personalizable, and simple-to-use AI assistant. Any files you wish for the system to be knowledgeable about, you upload to a new ‘notebook.’ Each notebook then serves as a personal toolbox for all the files you uploaded to it. Once within the notebook, the system reviews the files and, after a few seconds, is ready to go. Here’s what a typical notebook interface will look like:

On the right side of the notebook, the system re-populates a list of generatable tools. Within a matter of seconds, the system can generate:

An in-depth study guide

A timeline of events

A mindmap of the files’ content

A 5+ minute video overview

A 10-20 minute podcast

Yet, the tools aren’t static. If desired, each of the tools can be adjusted to adhere to a specific chapter, article, or topic, opening the door for countless avenues of depth.

At the center of the user interface, the notebook provides a chatbot dedicated to and knowledgeable of only the files the user has uploaded. Unlike the typical general AI models mentioned above, this Chatbot won’t bring in any ideas or content from random websites, Wikipedia pages, X posts, or any other potentially misleading or otherwise irrelevant sources. In addition to summarizing or finding quotations from the file(s), the chatbot can also adapt the text to make it more understandable. Take these two examples:

Southernized ‘To Be or Not To Be’ soliloquy

An acronym to memorize all of the plays

Now, for some greater context, each individual notebook can hold up to 50,000 pages of uploaded content. For context, the 39 plays, 154 sonnets, and a handful of other poems written by William Shakespeare could all be included in one notebook, and you would still have around 48,600 pages of room to spare. With this vast storage space in mind, the ability to enlist the assistance of AI to draw unique connections between major texts or even to imitate a dead author’s writing style or thought in an updated form is easy.

The main problem: tunnel vision. Unlike the typical AI chatbot models, which scour the internet for their answers, this system only reviews the sources uploaded. While this might confer a benefit with its greater textual accuracy, it opens the door to a user’s selection bias, and should not be used in a vacuum. Thus, it serves its specific intended purpose as a toolbox for educational and professional summarization and comprehension while not endeavoring to provide general responses to every query.

Ultimately, NotebookLM is built for education. When used correctly, this intuitive system has the potential to guide anyone through difficult material, summarize content in memorable and digestible ways, and efficiently answer specific text-based questions without the fear of completely fabricated quotations. Thus, as pencils are sharpened, books are opened, and tests are looming on the horizon, don’t forget to add this new notebook to your study sessions.

The New AI is sponsored on ThinkND by the Technology and Digital Studies Program in the College of Arts & Letters.  This program collaborates with the Computer Science and Engineering Department and other departments around the University to offer the Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science, the Minor in Data Science, and the Idzik Computing & Digital Technologies Minor.

“Listen and Learn” was written by Aiden Gilroy, and published as a part of the Tech Titans column on The New AI Project on LinkedIn on September 21, 2025.