NotebookLM

AI-powered notebooks for exploring and creating resources from your own sources.

  3 minute read  

NotebookLM is Google’s AI research and learning tool—give it your documents, PDFs, websites, or videos as sources, and it answers questions, creates summaries, and generates resources, drawing only on the information you’ve provided, with citations throughout.

Go to notebooklm.google.com and sign in with your school Google account to get started.

Key areas of NotebookLM

A diagram highlighting the main areas of NotebookLM

Sources

Sources are the foundation of your notebook. Add documents, websites, images, and videos to serve as the notebook’s knowledge base.

Note

NotebookLM takes a snapshot of each source when you add it. For Google Drive documents, you can re-sync to pick up changes: click the source and select “Sync with Google Drive”.

Chat

Here you can chat with your notebook, ask questions, and get answers based on your sources.

The approach is the same as prompting Gemini—but every response is grounded in your notebook’s sources, complete with citations.

You can save chat responses as a note.

Tip

Use the settings button to customise how the chat responds—choose a goal such as “learning guide”, or define a custom style or role for the notebook.

Studio

Studio lets you generate resources from your sources using AI.

  • Audio overview: A podcast-style conversation between two AI hosts discussing the key ideas from your sources.
  • Data table: Extracts data or key information from your sources.
  • Flashcards: A set of question-and-answer cards about the material.
  • Infographic: A visual summary of key facts and figures from your material.
  • Mind map: An interactive diagram showing how the key topics and ideas in your sources connect.
  • Quiz: A multiple-choice quiz.
  • Report: A structured piece of writing drawing from your sources.
  • Slide deck: A ready-made presentation covering the main points from your notebook.
  • Video overview: A short video, with three choices of format: cinematic, explainer, and brief.
Tip

Some tiles include an arrow button to the right. Click on that to customise the resource or provide specific instructions.

You can also use the “Add note” option to add custom annotations to your notebook’s resources.

Notebooks vs the Gemini app

NotebookLM uses the same Gemini AI, but it’s distinct from the Gemini app in two important ways:

  • Organised notebooks: Group sources, notes, and resources into a self-contained, shareable collection.
  • Grounded responses: Chat and tools draw only from your sources—reducing the risk of AI hallucinations, where the AI generates plausible but incorrect information.

You can ask Gemini to work with a document, but when you chat with NotebookLM, you’re effectively chatting with your entire collection of sources.

Tip

You can ask Gemini about your notebooks! Click the “+” in the Gemini app and choose the NotebookLM option.

Student access

NotebookLM is currently available to Outwood students in years 10–13.

Students have access to most of the same features as staff. However, they cannot:

  • Generate new slides or infographics, though they can view any in a notebook you share with them
  • Generate Deep Research reports
  • Use interactive mode for audio overviews
Tip

Share notebooks with groups of students as classwork in Google Classroom.

Example notebooks

These public notebooks showcase NotebookLM’s features. They are read-only, so you can’t generate your own resources, but you can interact with the existing ones and chat with the notebook, as a colleague or student would if you shared it with them.