Transcript

this is the fourth and final part of our Gemini adoption series. So four webinars plus two on-demand videos, one of which Mark did that are designed to introduce you as the workspace admin maybe the operations person, maybe the IT person at your company.

How do you take advantage of all these Gemini AI tools that all of a sudden Google has given you access to as part of your workspace subscription? This is the fourth and final part. We're diving into my personal favorite tool NotebookLM which is super powerful.

I think some of the stuff that Mark's gonna show you is pretty mind blowing and a real differentiator between Gemini and every other AI platform out there

I'm gonna hand it over to Mark Baquirin. He is a customer engineer. Many of you are familiar with him from our other webinars, like our gPanelnel webinars. He's done a. Bunch of those. A lot of you have worked directly with him on your workshops and your implementations with Promevo. Thank you Mark for doing this.

Mark, if you'll walk us through NotebookLM and take it away. 

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you Brandon. And thank you everyone for being here today. I'm Mark Baquirin from the customer engineering team. And today we'll be going over NotebookLM i'm gonna be doing just a few slides just to bring everyone up to speed on what it is, and then we will go into a live demo where I'll show you how to use all of the features through it.

If you haven't created a notebook before, we'll go through creating a notebook and just all of the features along with that. Let's go ahead and get started. What is NotebookLM. NotebookLM is your personalized AI learning companion designed to provide you with critical insights from the information that you provided.

It really helps transform your research and writing. It's an AI tool that accelerates your ability to find, summarize, and understand information and all within the secure context of your organization's shared knowledge base. NotebookLM offers several key features. First, it prioritizes data privacy and security.

So that means that your personal data remains yours. It's not used for training Gemini or any other AI models. And for workspace accounts. Google ensures data privacy through no query or answer logging. Second, it's grounded in trusted information with inline citations for accuracy and transparency.

Third, it accelerates the path from information to insights via powerful summarization features, which I'll go over a little bit later. And finally, it supports multimodal research, including texts, graphs, images, audio, and multiple languages.

NotebookLM lets you upload various types of sources like websites, slides, docs, PDFs, texts audio file types, and then even YouTube URLs, which is very cool. And you can upload up to 50 sources per notebook with each source containing 500,000 words. So that's if you have NotebookLM , just the regular.

If you upgrade to NotebookLM Pro, which is what we're gonna be using the demo that source limit goes up to from 50 sources to 300 sources. So quite an upgrade. And you can then chat with these sources and the notebook will provide you with grounded information based on them.

It allows you to create things like audio overviews, briefing docs, and paper outlines. So with NotebookLM, you can quickly get up to speed on dense or complex reading materials. And like I said before, you can upload a variety of different formats and quite, quite a few sources and that makes things easier.

You can also use pre-made prompts like the study guide or the briefing documents options, which I'll be going over to help get you started right away. And if you'd rather listen to a summary of your sources, you can create an audio overview. And that's like this podcast style.

We'll take a listen to how that sounds later. If you're looking to dive deeper, you can prompt all of your data sources at the same time to gather insights or dynamically generate new content. I'll show you how that works once again in the demo. But it's all about making your work faster, smarter, and more efficient.

The main value add to for NotebookLM however, is being your research and note taking assistant. You can upload sources and start to identify key ideas or interesting facts and, just put together seemingly unrelated ideas. You could chat with NotebookLM to explore those sources and look for interesting connections between them. Create outlines for whatever type of document you're creating, which helps overcome the initial sort of writer's block that can happen to all of us. So imagine being able to instantly share critical knowledge and collaborate seamlessly. With NotebookLM, you can create a single comprehensive notebook containing all relevant documents, whether it's for onboarding new employees, detailing product information, or outlining a class topic and then share it with your team, but it goes beyond simple. Simply sharing documents. You can grant others the ability to add or remove sources, allowing everyone to contribute to building a shared knowledge base. And this really helps foster true collaboration and ensures that everyone has access to the most up-to-date information.

Here's some common use cases by, role or maybe department or team. For a sales team you can use NotebookLM to help you prepare for meetings and you can conduct product research, look into product information, things like that for school teachers, school teachers can create lesson plans and study guides with NotebookLM. For company trainers or the HR team.

They could use it to onboard new hires and then provide them with ex with a knowledge base or existing materials on the company. For your support teams, they can use NotebookLM to provide quick access to help articles for troubleshooting. For your marketing team. NotebookLM can generate campaign ideas and other creative content like that.

And for product teams it's a centralized centralizes information and speeds up development. So basically, NotebookLM can help all your teams organize information and create insights faster. And that's just laying the guidelines and giving you an overview.

But for now, we're gonna switch over to a demo.

Here we go. So if you haven't discovered NotebookLM, all you have to do is go to NotebookLM.google.com, and it will bring you to this page. Here. You can create a new notebook here or you'll have access to all of your existing notebooks as well, once you've made a notebook.

But we're gonna go ahead and dive right in and create a new notebook, and we'll go ahead and get started. When you create a new notebook, the initial popup is the the popup where you can add sources. I'm gonna close that for now, and I'm just gonna give you a look around NotebookLM first.

We'll close that off here. This is the layout of NotebookLM it's divided into three sections. Over on the left hand side you have your sources section, and that's where we're gonna add our sources. That's the first thing you wanna start off with after you've added your sources. The center section is for chatting.

And this is chatting with with NotebookLM, the ai, and you're typically chatting regarding the sources that, that you've entered here. Over to the right there is the studio section. The studio section is where you can create an audio overview based on your sources. And then you also have other tools available to you.

You have note taking down here. And a quick way to build out a study guide, a briefing doc frequently asked question sheet and a timeline, and I'll go over all of those with you. Up at the top in the right we have the analytics button. This is when you share your notebook out with your team.

You have to share your notebook out with four people and there should be some chat activity within the past seven days. After it's gathered that information, you'll begin to get analytics on everyone's usage.

You have the share button here, I'll go over that a bit, a little bit later. But that's where you share your notebook. And then you have your settings here. But do wanna point out your settings. You have the ability to change from light or dark.

I'm in dark mode right now, so if you prefer my look, just switch over to dark mode. Also you can manage your subscriptions here, so if you do wanna upgrade to NotebookLM Pro and have access to all of the benefits there that's where you do it. All right, so let's get started on making a new notebook.

So first things first, we're gonna add some sources here. So over on the left hand side, we'll begin with the sources. I can add sources or I can hit discover. Let me go ahead and add sources. So if I wanted to add sources I have a number of options here. Here I can upload sources from my from my device.

And the file types that I can upload are P-D-F-T-X-D, markdown and audio files such as MP3s. Down in this section here, you can add in either Google Docs or Google slides that that you have in your Google Drive. This section here is where you can add in website URLs or YouTube URLs or if you just had a pasted if you've copied some text and you wanted to paste it in, you can use this here.

You can see down here there's a source limit and it's like your fuel gauge. I've got zero out of 300 sources currently. I'm gonna go ahead and add one source, or actually, before I add a source let me show you the discover sources up at the upper right hand section. So for discover sources, you can use this in combination with your own sources, but this actually helps you discover sources from outside of your of your workspace, external or externally.

You just have to give it a quick prompt. I'm gonna ask it to tell me about gPanelnel. Fantastic product. Let's see what it comes up with. It's gonna. Scour the internet and it's going to find relevant information about gPanel. There's typically 10 here. Let's see. Yeah, I. I have the ability to, if I wanted to, I can click on this icon here to it.

It'll pop up the source in another tab, which you won't be able to see here. You can inspect the source and make sure that it's what you wanna include in your sources or not. If you don't want it, simply uncheck the box there and it won't be included. So I'm gonna keep all of these sources and I'm gonna go ahead and hit import. That's a quick way for you to find sources that are out there, and you can once again use this in combination with internal sources that you have. I'm also gonna add in one PDF from my own repository.

All right. So it's adding in the PDF I just pointed to from my own device. And it's gonna take a moment for it to become ready here, but I have 11 sources and all. Towards the right of my sources, you can see that there are check boxes here,

you can check or uncheck them here. So whatever you've got checked here, that's what you'll be chatting against. If you're gonna be using the chat in the middle or if you're gonna create any of these notes on the side just keep in mind whatever you have checked here is what it's going to be looking against. You can see here that my chat has given me just an initial like overview of what my my sources are and down in the center. I I could start asking questions regarding my sources, just whichever sources I have selected. And it's given me some pre-made questions down here.

Let me just use a pre-made question 'cause it's actually tough for me to even read this on my small monitor, so I'm just gonna use that pre-made question. What security and compliance features does gPanelnel offer? Okay, great question and it's gonna look through all of these sources and get me an answer.

And here we go. I can continue to ask it. Different types of questions, maybe piece together. Maybe information that I'm looking for. You can see here there's a number of footnotes and citations. If I hover over any of these, it's going to give me brief summary.

But if I actually click on it, what it's going to do is. It will go to that specific source and it will actually highlight the section that it's referencing so you have a good idea about which source it's pulling that information from. So that's very helpful. I'm gonna go ahead and generate the audio overview because it, this does take a few minutes to generate. You can see in the upper right it's generating and what the audio overview is. It's a podcast style overview of all of my sources or the sources that I've selected here.

And, I didn't do it for that one, but you can also customize it if you wanted it to focus in on a specific topic. You can also use the customization, which was, it's not showing anymore, but it was here in, in the right. But we'll let that cook for a minute. It's gonna take maybe typically takes about four or five minutes to create the audio overview, so that I wanted to get that started now.

Over I'll come back to the mind map in just a second. But over at the top, if you needed to refresh your conversation, if you wanted to start a new thread of thought, that's what your refresh is for. It's right up here in the top center. You can just go ahead and hit continue.

It'll wipe that that conversation for you. And then this tool here, this is where you can configure your notebook conversation. Here you can define your conversational style. I'm on the default settings, but you can make it more analytical or be more of a guide or if you hit custom, you can actually put in your own prompt to to customize it in a style that you want.

And here's an example. Respond at a PhD student level. And here's another one. Pretend to be a role player, game host. So that's a couple of examples on how you could use the customized conversation style and then also for your length. How long would you like the the generated response to be?

You could I have it at the default setting, but you can make it longer than that or shorter than that. So those are a couple of your settings there. All right, over on the right hand side, we're gonna focus on the studio section the studio section. At the top is the audio overview, which we've got cooking right now.

So down below here are your notes. If I wanted to actually create a new note, actually instead of creating a new note, which you can click create a note. You can write whatever you'd like here, and then when you go back, your note will be saved. Another way to do it is if you are, as you're having a conversation with the ai, if there's a specific part that you want to capture as a note, it's gonna give you the option at the bottom. So let's say I read this through and I'm. Like, oh, this is a great piece of information.

Just head to the bottom and you can simply save that as a note. So I'll hit save as a note and it'll pull the last the last conversation. It'll pull it into a note here. And also if you wanted to just maybe just take a snippet. Maybe I wanted to just highlight this section. I can copy it, and then that's when I would typically use add a note, and then I'd, paste it in here and then put in my additional, notes down there if I needed to. So that's how you can just add notes. And these are for you to just look at. If you wanted to convert any of these notes into sources, including the other ones that I'm about to go into here at the bottom you can always hit convert to source and then it'll bring that over to your sources and then you can include that in your audio overviews or anything else.

You have prebuilt options here. You can create a study guide. So I'm gonna go ahead and create study guide. Actually, they all, these all take a couple of seconds to generate, so I'm gonna do all of them.

Study guide. This is very helpful for if you do need to take. A lot of sources and quickly be able to get up to speed the study guide it will build you out a quiz and then also build an answer key. It'll give you some essay questions and oh, this time it included. This doesn't, didn't seem to happen all the time, but this time it gave me the glossary of key terms that might be useful to me.

So it does depend on the type of sources you have in this case. Because gPanel is a topic that. It does have a lot of like key terms. It did produce that for me here, but that's what the study guide is for. It's to really help make this information make sense to you. The briefing doc kind of gives you an overview of I only have 11 sources here, but say I had 150 sources might be good to have an overview of what those sources were about.

And typically it would also give me recommendations on that. Let's see what that briefing doc looks like. Here we go. It's giving me an executive summary here, key terms and important ideas that I should know about gPanel or about these sources on gPanel different capabilities, and just a variety of things.

It's always gonna be a bit different just depending on your collection of sources that you've included. Then it's giving me a conclusion here. Oh. Okay. Sometimes it'll give you recommendations. This time it's a conclusion, so based on your sources, but that's very helpful just to get a quick overview of what's going on with your sources.

Next we have the FAQ. Based on your sources it can generate frequently asked questions for you. So here we go. It's ready. So here are some questions. What is gPanel? Probably the most important question here, and then it gives you oops. It gives you an answer and then it goes on to just give you many more common questions and then the answers to those questions.

Next we have the timeline. This was really source dependent as well, based on the types of sources you have. It'll create a timeline for you highlighting the key notable events, and then also a cast of characters if possible. So you can see here I've got a detailed timeline of events just different things that happened during the history of gPanel here.

Then down at the bottom I've got a cast of characters. So just notable characters based off of the sources, of course. So anyone that's been mentioned here and what their connection with gPanel is. So that's a pretty cool one to have there. I'm gonna head back here. If you go back to the center section you'll see this mind map button. And so what is this mind map? So let me click on it and you can see that it's generating a mind map right down here. The mind map it creates a visual representation of your information.

So I've just clicked on it and you can see just with my source information, it branches out into these. Let's see. What do I have here? Eight main categories I've got. It's categorized into the overview, different features, the tiers, so on and so forth. I can open these up and I can go ahead and maybe I wanted to explore more of the tier section.

Okay. I've got starter, standard, and enterprise tier. That is correct. So let me see what's in the enterprise tier, and this is what the enterprise tier contains. So if you zoom out, you have a great idea of where you are here, and then you can open up, several things. Maybe I wanna compare the enterprise tier and the standard tier.

So here would be the main, differences between the two. I'll click on the gPanel. API, I wanna find out a little bit more about that. So it's gonna actually pull that information into the chat.

And you can see here now it's telling me specifically about the gPanel, API, and I can maybe go from, it's tougher for me to see now, but if I wanted to see something about maybe the shared drive management in the standard tier, I can click on that and I can get information about that and then I could ask you questions, maybe comparing the two if I want it, or, iterate on it in any way that I wanted to.

But that's what this mind map is for. It gives you a really, good visual representation of where your ideas are within like the grand scheme of things. It can be very helpful. Also, you can download that too, so that's also a nice feature. So that's the mind map. I can see that our audio overview is ready.

We're gonna give this a play. What this does is it gives you a podcast style. The amazing thing about it is how natural it sounds. I'm gonna go ahead and give it a play for a few seconds and we'll see what it sounds like. 

Welcome to the deep Dive.

This is where we take your stack of sources, articles, maybe threads, reports, whatever you've shared. And we try to cut through the noise. Yeah, pull out the essential insights. We're basically here to help you navigate all that information so you get well informed without, drowning in it.

Think of us as your guides for your material. 

Okay. So that's the way the voices sound. And again, I just generated the default session. I did not direct it to to talk about any specific topic I could have, though. I could have asked it, Hey focus in on the gPanel enterprise tier, and then they would've been talking about that.

So there's, a million different ways you can prompt it and obviously you'll get a different audio overview each time. What's great about this is you can download this and and you could save that. So if you're, if you wanted to listen to your information on the go, you'd have that with you.

Also you, we have this interactive mode, so let me click on that and show you how that works with the interactive mode. The same, the exact same podcast plays but. I can just interrupt it with spoken language at any point and it they will respond to me. So let me give you a demonstration of that.

Welcome to the deep dive. This is where we take your stack of sources, articles, maybe through, oh, hey, I think our listeners got something to say. 

Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about the gPanel, enterprise Tier?

Oh, absolutely. That's a great question. Let's unpack this a bit. Yes. The enterprise tier of gPanel really steps things up, so it includes everything you get in the starter and standard tiers, right? Oh yeah, go on. 

Can you compare the starter tier with the enterprise tier? Compare the features.

That's a fantastic question. Let's look at the core differences in features. Okay, so the starter tier, as we've touched on, gives you those core functionalities, right? Basic user management, email signature templates, device and calendar management, and. All 

right, I'll pause it there, but you can get a feel for what it's like to interact with it.

It's very natural. It's a very easy way to get to the information that you want out of the podcast. So that's the the audio overview section. Next, we're gonna head up to the last part which would be the sharing. So if you wanted to share your notebook out with your team you can head up here to sharing you can pick a team member.

You can adjust their access. They could either be a viewer or an editor. So a viewer of course, would have view only permissions and editor can actually edit the sources and the notes on each side. If you wanted to give a welcome message, you can enable that and you can write your own custom welcome message.

And what do they have access to? Right down here. This is a cool feature. You can give them access to the full notebook or the chat only. And so what's the difference there? Let me back out. If here, if you give them access to the full notebook, it would be everything that you see here, the sources section, the chat section, and the studio section.

And yes, if they're an editor they'd be able to. They would be able to edit everything if they were a viewer. It's just view only, but they can interact with the chat. And then if you gave them access to only the chat, they would not see sources and they would not see Studio. They would only see the chat section.

So you could load up your sources with say maybe like a company handbook if you were like an hr in an HR role. Maybe you could load this up with the company handbook and then you can have, your employees come here. If they had questions, HR questions, they could ask about perhaps their VA vacation plans or their health benefits or anything like that.

And it would just pull from the sources that are hidden to them and then answer their questions for you. So it's really nice. A way to provide answers to your team members or your employees through NotebookLM, I think let me double check. I think that about covers all of the features here and how to make a notebook and everything.

I just wanna say like this at the beginning of this series we talked about, the AI impression that a lot of people have is, oh, it can write an email for me, or, oh, can generate a doc for me. But really when you get underneath the surface or tools like this where you know this is gonna fundamentally help me understand things differently, I can learn things. One example of how I use this particular tool right now, I'm doing a vendor evaluation, a lot of complexity. They're all sending me these like huge PDFs.

They all have different pricing models. I'm not good at that stuff. I'm a marketing guy, so of course I'm terrible at numbers. I can take all of that stuff and put it in here. I can put it in a notebook and say, Hey, explain to me the differences between this. I'm a big podcast guy, so I of course default immediately to that, and I ask them, I, I love that ability to interrupt their podcast and just ask random questions.

It's such a great way for people that are not traditional learners like myself it's a great way for me to get, all of my dumb questions answered over and over, and they never get frustrated. It's remarkable. Thank you for that. Mark. The question is, I'm assuming that when you upload a Google Doc with multiple tabs, that Notebook is able to access all of the tabs, or does it just read the initial tab? 

Okay. Thanks Rachel. Great question. So we you can upload Google Docs and Google Slides only not Google Sheets. In Google Sheets, I know that you can have separate workbook or worksheet tabs.

I wasn't aware that's a thing in Docs. I'm not sure. Brenda, is that a It's, 

yeah, it's, you can, it's almost like chapters over on the sidebar. 

Oh. Those types of tabs. Okay. Yes. It will actually read all of that. So if sorry, I was thinking tabs. The other with Google Docs?

Yes. If you have a type of doc that's constructed with those I believe they're called, I forgot the term now. Those side chapter tabs, then yes, it'll actually read the entire document. Great question.

What I use a lot is the copied text. So if you don't want it to look at the entirety of a document, you can just copy in and paste a section of it. That's a great point. Yeah. It can use that as its source. Mark. Much appreciated. Thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through what a cool tool.

Thank you for having me and to everyone out there we appreciate all of your time and attention. Bye now. Thanks all.