Note that Insight

Note that Insight!

In NotebookLM, notes are where you capture and organize your key findings and insights. Think of them as your research hub within the notebook.

What is a Note?

In general, a note is a record of something important—an idea, a fact, a question, or a reminder. In NotebookLM, notes serve a few special purposes:

  • Capturing Ideas: You can create blank notes to jot down your own thoughts, questions, or summaries as you work through your research. This is like your personal research journal within the notebook.
  • Saving Answers: When you get a helpful response from the chat, you can save it as a note to refer to later. These notes are a record of the AI’s analysis of your sources.
  • Building on Insights: You can even turn your notes into sources, allowing you to combine your own thinking with the information from your original documents.

A Research Workflow with Notes

Here’s how you can use notes to power your research projects:

  1. Define Your Questions: Start by breaking down your research topic into a set of clear research questions.
  2. Gather Information: Use NotebookLM’s chat and source overview features to find answers to your questions.
  3. Capture Key Findings:
    • Save helpful chat responses as notes.
    • Create your own notes to record your own insights, interpretations, or questions that arise.
  4. Organize Your Notes: Use note titles within the Studio panel to organize your notes into a meaningful structure.
  5. Summarize and Share:
    • Use NotebookLM’s summary features (audio overview, FAQ, briefing docs, timeline) to create summaries of your findings.
    • Consider using the “Customize Audio Overview” option in the audio overview to tailor the summary to specific aspects of your research.
    What are these preset summaries?

    Preset Summaries

    Here’s a description of each preset:

    • FAQ generates a list of ten frequently asked questions with answers for the sources you uploaded.
    • Study Guide converts your source material into three parts that are helpful for learning: a short answer quiz with an answer key, a suggested list of long-form essay questions, and a glossary of key terms.
    • Briefing Doc takes the key facts or insights from your sources and presents them in an easy-to-understand outline.
    • Timeline generates a chronological list of all the important events mentioned in your sources. It also makes a “cast of characters” with short bios for all the important people mentioned in your sources.
    • Audio Overview translates your source material into a conversation between two AI hosts in the style of a podcast.
  6. Refine and Iterate:
    • If the preset summaries don’t perfectly fit your needs, you can create your own summaries based on your notes.
    • You can also amass a collection of notes, remove the original source materials, convert the notes into sources, and then use NotebookLM to generate a new summary based on your refined insights.

NotebookLM’s Role in your Research Project

NotebookLM makes this entire process smoother and more efficient by:

  • Providing a Central Hub: It acts as a container for all your sources, regardless of their format, making it easy to manage and analyze diverse information.
  • Enhancing Understanding: The source overview feature gives you a quick grasp of each document’s key takeaways.
  • Facilitating Exploration: The chat functionality allows you to ask questions and get answers conversationally.
  • Supporting Your Thinking: You can record your own ideas and reflections in notes, creating a dynamic research journal.
  • Summarizing and Reporting: The built-in summary features help you synthesize your findings and share them with your audience.
What's source overview?

What is a Source Overview?

A source overview is a summary of a document that you upload or paste into NotebookLM. NotebookLM creates a source overview automatically when you upload a new source. The purpose of a source overview is to help you understand the source material better by summarizing the document and suggesting key topics and questions.

NotebookLM and company analysis using AI is a new skill. I am excited to have you join me in this journey.

Dry run project

The Dry Run project lets you test your new NotebookLM skills. Take it a step further! Create a notebook for your chosen company using similar source documents and try the example prompts from the tutorial. It’s a great head start on your company analysis project.