NotebookLM: turning your sources into an assistant

What it is good at

• Answers are grounded strictly in your uploaded sources and cited back to the specific passage they came from.
• Handles a genuinely large and mixed set of source types together, PDFs, web links, text notes, audio.
• Can generate an audio-style overview discussion of your sources, useful for reviewing material passively.
• Reduces the risk of an answer drifting into confident but ungrounded general knowledge.

Where it falls short

• It won't answer well outside what your uploaded sources actually cover, by design.
• Very large or messy source sets still benefit from some manual organisation before uploading.
• It's built for synthesis and analysis of what's given, not for original creative generation.

How to use it for creative work

1. 01

   Upload only the sources relevant to the question at hand

   Build a notebook around one project or research question rather than dumping everything into one giant notebook, which keeps answers focused and citations more useful.

2. 02

   Ask for synthesis, not just a summary of one document

   With several sources uploaded, ask questions that require comparing across them, 'where do these three reports disagree', which is where it adds the most value over reading each alone.

3. 03

   Check the citation for anything going into real work

   Click through to the cited passage to confirm it says what the answer claims, especially for a number or specific fact you'll repeat elsewhere.

4. 04

   Use the audio overview for passive review

   Generate an audio-style discussion of the notebook's content to review the material while doing something else, then follow up with written questions on anything unclear.

5. 05

   Keep separate notebooks for separate projects

   Start a fresh notebook per research topic or client rather than one continuously growing notebook, to keep source sets and citations relevant to the question at hand.

Ready-to-use prompts

Based only on the sources in this notebook, where do they agree and where do they disagree on [topic]? Cite the specific source for each point.

Does anything in these sources support or contradict the claim that [claim]? Quote the relevant passage and cite the source.

Create a study guide covering the key concepts across all sources in this notebook, organised by topic, with a citation for each point.

Based on these sources, what questions about [topic] remain unanswered or under-covered across all of them?

Build a comparison table of the key positions or data points on [topic] across each source in this notebook.

Questions people ask

What makes NotebookLM different from a normal AI chat?

It only answers based on the specific sources you upload into that notebook and cites the exact passage behind each answer, rather than drawing on broader general knowledge the way a standard chat does.

Can NotebookLM handle audio and video sources?

It supports a range of source types including audio, alongside documents, text and links, letting you build a notebook from a mixed set of material on one topic.

Is NotebookLM good for original creative writing?

Not really, it's built for synthesis and analysis of the sources you give it, so use another tool for original creative generation and NotebookLM for grounded research work.