Try out NotebookLM’s Video Overviews

Have you used NotebookLM? It’s part of Google Workspace and is an AI-powered research and writing assistant. Every month Google has been adding more and more features to it.

There are 3 main parts to it:

1) Sources — You can upload documents, webpages, YouTube videos, text, etc.

2) Chat — You can chat with the AI and it will use the sources as a reference in its answers.

3) Studio — You can create study guides, mind maps, a discussion-style podcast, and now create a video presentation, giving an overview of your source material.

​Here, I’m going to focus on the new Video Overview feature. With a click of a button, you can create a video summary of what you’ve added in your sources. Plus, it gives you the option to focus the video on specific areas, and even create the video in another language.

Here’s a demo of it:

I added a number of webpage links from the training website of the CRM software, Salesforce. These were pages which explained how to use reports and dashboards on the platform.

It took me a couple of minutes to add the links (basically a copy and paste job), then I clicked Video Overview to create the video. This takes a few minutes to create.

You can watch it on NotebookLM or download it as a video file. I think it’s a great video to introduce a team to reports and dashboards on Salesforce!

​If you speak Spanish, I also created a Spanish version using the same sources in English:

​I work in a multilingual environment, so it’s brilliant to be able to share the same information in different languages. It is interesting that the video isn’t just a translation and contains different visuals.

Here are some other ideas of how NotebookLM can be used:

1. Company Knowledge Base: Notebooks can be made public, allowing people to ask questions about the source material. A company could add information about their products and services and either staff or customers could ask questions about them.

2. Research Assistant: Quickly synthesize information from multiple documents, websites, and sources to understand complex topics and identify key themes.

3. Creative Brainstorming: Generate new ideas, characters, or plot points by combining and remixing different source materials, helping to overcome writer’s block.

4. Summarizing Long Documents: Get a high-level summary of dense research papers, legal documents, or long articles without having to read them in their entirety.

5. Learning and Studying: Create custom quizzes and flashcards from your notes and textbooks to test your knowledge and reinforce what you’ve learned. At the time of writing these have been made unavailable due to excessive demand).

6. Speech and Presentation Writing: Pull key statistics, quotes, and talking points from your sources to build a compelling and well-supported speech or presentation.

7. Personal Knowledge Base: Build a searchable and interconnected knowledge base from your own documents, notes, and research, making it easy to find information you’ve gathered in the past.

8. Policy and Strategy Development: Analyse internal reports, market research, and competitor data to identify trends and inform strategic decisions.

Try it out, it’s brilliant! 😁

Want to learn some quick Google Sheets tricks, check out my tips video here.