Doing Research with NotebookLM

Fascinating blog post by Vidit Bhargava (creator of the excellent LookUp dictionary app) about how he worked on his master thesis with the aid of Google’s NotebookLM.

I used NotebookLM throughout my thesis, not because I was interested in it generating content for me (I think AI generated text and images are sloppy and classless); but because it’s a genuinely great research organization tool that provides utility of drawing connections between discreet topics and helping me understand my own journey better.

Make sure to check out the examples of his interviews and research material as indexed by the service.

As I explained in an episode of AppStories a while back, and as John also expanded upon in the latest issue of the Monthly Log for Club members, we believe that assistive AI tools that leverage modern LLM advancements to help people work better (and less) are infinitely superior to whatever useless slop generative tools produce.

Google’s NotebookLM is, in my opinion, one of the most intriguing new tools in this field. For the past two months, I’ve been using it as a personal search assistant for the entire archive of 10 years of annual iOS reviews – that’s more than half a million words in total. Not only can NotebookLM search that entire library in seconds, but it does so with even the most random natural language queries about the most obscure details I’ve ever covered in my stories, such as “When was the copy and paste menu renamed to edit menu?” (It was iOS 16.). It’s becoming increasingly challenging for me, after all these years, to keep track of the growing list of iOS-related minutiae; from a personal productivity standpoint, NotebookLM has to be one of the most exciting new products I’ve tried in a while. (Alongside Shortwave for email.)

Just today, I discovered that my read-later tool of choice – Readwise Reader – offers a native integration to let you search highlights with NotebookLM. That’s another source that I’m definitely adding to NotebookLM, and I’m thinking of how I could replicate the same Readwise Reader setup (highlights are appended to a single Google Doc) with Zapier and RSS feeds. Wouldn’t it be fun, for instance, if I could search the entire archive of AppStories show notes in NotebookLM, or if I could turn starred items from Feedbin into a standalone notebook as well?

I’m probably going to have to sign up for NotebookLM Plus when it launches for non-business accounts, which, according to Google, should happen in early 2025.