EP 578: NotebookLM’s New Video Overviews: 5 pieces of practical advice

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Google's Notebook LM has just released video overviews and a handful of other new updates. And I think these are pretty big. There's very few times as someone that covers AI every single day where I'm impressed by something. Maybe three years ago I was more easily impressed, but looking at things every single day now, I'm not easily impressed. And these new video overviews from Google's Notebook LM actually took me back for a second and I'm like, wait. I'm having one of those moments where I see something in generative AI and I'm like, this can change how we learn and create. So in today's show, we're going to be going over Notebook LM's new video overviews and five pieces of practical advice for everyday business leaders and how you can use these. All right, I'm excited for today's show. I hope you are, too. What's going on, y'? All? My name is Jordan Wilson and welcome to Everyday AI. This is your daily livestream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and me not just learn AI and keep up with it, but how we can leverage all of this information to grow our companies and our careers. If that's you, you're in the right place. It starts here with the unedited, unscripted live stream podcast. But if you really want to take it to the next level, be the smartest person in AI in your department or company, your everydayai.com. that is the cheat code that you need to go check out and sign up for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping the highlights of today's episode as well as keeping you up to date with all of the other AI happenings. And you can go listen to now more than 570 episodes for free, where we teach you literally everything. Talk to the world's leading experts in AI. So if you want the AI news, make sure to go check out that newsletter. So let's talk about what is new inside of Notebook LM's new video overviews. And this is part of our new weekly Kind of AI at Work on Wednesdays, where on Wednesdays we do a very practical and actionable tutorial sometimes on, you know, new features, new updates, but more than anything, trying to give you a way in the middle of the week that you can start winning back time by using generative AI. So hopefully you all are enjoying this, this new segment. And you all did pick this, FYI. So we put something in our newsletter. We said, you know, in the last, like three days, there's been so many new announcements, and you all overwhelmingly wanted to see and hear about the new Notebook LM updates. So today we're going to go over how Notebook LM's new video overviews work. We're going to detail other new updates inside of Notebook LM Studio. They might seem small. I think they're actually big. And I'm going to dish five important things that you need to know to take advantage of all of these things. All right, so let's start live. Before we get started, live stream audience, give me a suggestion here. I, I, I need a profession, all right, And I'm going to explain why, but it can be anything, like, you know, seasoned marketer, recent HR hire. You know, give me a specific profession, if you could. And I'm going to wait for one and, and then I'm going to share my screen here. And what we're going to do is I'm going to essentially start a video overview. I have a notebook inside of Notebook LM already loaded up. All right, I just, I just want to show you all how this happens live, how this works. And we're going to get it started now, and then we're going to go over kind of bullet points of what's new, how it works. All right, so we're going to start, you know, start this thing kind of at the end. We're going to put the cake in the oven, so to speak, and then we're going to talk and break down the recipe for success. So let's see, we have a couple options so far. Live stream audience, thank you for your suggestions and good to see you all, as always. So, so far, Richard said, new engineer, we have red pen here on YouTube saying consultant, marketer, product manager, research analyst, IT consultant, realtor. All right, let me think, let me think. I'll give the live stream audience another 30 seconds to, to get things going here. Real estate broker, data analytics, compliance officer. All right, let's do. I like, I like research analysts. We're going to do a research analyst. All right, so we're going to do this live. So live stream audience, if you also could please let me know if you can see my screen. I'm going to be sharing this here in a second. All right? All right, so hopefully, live stream audience, you can see my screen. Please let me know if you can all right, so like I said, we're going to start at the end and then I'm going to go through and explain everything that's new. All right, so there's a new panel on the right hand side. And if you don't see this yet, number one, you need to have a paid account. It at least they didn't say this outright, but previous features are limited to paid accounts. So I'm going to reach out to my friends at Google and verify these things. But I'm pretty sure this is only available to paid accounts. Another thing, I have multiple paid accounts for Google Gemini. So if you have that $20 a month Google Gemini update, you can go to Notebook lm, log in and see if you have this. You'll know if you have it. If on the right hand side, if you there's a refreshed ui, but you're going to see a new kind of green tab that says Video Overview. All right, And I only have this right now on my personal Gmail account. So I have paid accounts on my personal Gmail. And then on my work workspace account, I don't have it yet. So I don't know if they're going to roll this out to all workspace accounts. But let's keep that in mind. All right, so I'm going to now click the video overview button, but I'm going to click Customize. All right, so more on this later. Okay, so I already have this ready to go. And I'm going to say I said research Analyst. All right, so I'm going to give this, I'm going to let this go. All right? And then I'm going to explain what we put here in this prompt. So I customized the video overview. I said compile the top five hot, top five AI hot takes on the future of work based on the sources. All right, and then I'm going to. And then I said personalize this for research analysts. I said keep the video overview short, specific and actionable. Try and use a bit of humor where appropriate. Use as many visuals from my presentation as possible. More on that here in a second. And then I said pull out pinpoint specific and valuable insights and avoid generalities. All right, so let's jump back into the workbook, the notebook here. And I do. I don't know if this is going to be done because I did a couple of tests on this and I don't know if it's because it's brand new. Obviously this creates a video podcast with visuals, so it takes longer. So if You've done the very popular and viral audio overviews inside of Notebook lm. You know, depending on the amount of content, if you personalize it or not, it could take anywhere from, you know, three to six minutes to generate an audio podcast. The video overviews take much longer. So I've done a couple of them so far. They've taken anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. So I don't know if we're going to be able to check in on this one at the end. I did already do this minus that personalization for a, a, what was it? A research analyst. All right, so what I have here inside of Notebook LM on the left hand side, I have all of my sources and I'm going to be breaking down how this works here in a minute, don't worry. So what I uploaded as my sources is I uploaded a bunch of, of PDFs of different keynotes that I've done. All right, and, and training. So I do a lot of keynote speaking. Actually just did a, a pretty fun one last week here in Chicago at Microsoft's office downtown for Chicago Tech Week. So I have that in there. I have a couple trainings that I've done. So I have a bunch of keynotes with visuals that are PDFs and that's important and hopefully we'll be able to see why at the end. And then I also uploaded some, just the websites of some recent episodes I've done from the everyday AI website, kind of future of work episodes, chat, GPT episodes, etc. So I have about a dozen different sources that it's pulling this information from. All right, are we all on the same page? And if you do have questions, live stream audience, please get them in podcast audience. FYI, I always put my, my LinkedIn and our email address in the show notes. So if you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, make sure to check out the show notes. So if you do have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Sometimes it takes me a minute to get to everyone, but I do eventually. All right, now let's get back and talk a little bit exactly what's new and why it matters. So the biggest thing that's grabbing the headlines is obviously the video overviews. So the audio overviews, right, they've been very popular, very viral for the last six months. NotebookLM I think is one of the most underutilized and least talked about AI tools out there. It's by Google. It's a little different than Google Gemini. There's a lot of similarities, but I'M gonna break that down here in a minute. But the biggest thing here, you know, the audio overviews, where you can upload all your information and you have these two very realistic kind of AI voices, do a podcast, and they kind of riff on all your content. Very cool. But now this is the video version of that. There's some differences, the voices. So let me start picking this apart. What's not the same? The voices are different. Not that that matters. Right? But I think it's important to know because, you know, a lot of people have flooded, you know, podcast platforms, social media, YouTube, et cetera with the Notebook LM content and voices. So you always want to know what's real and what's fake. So these are different voices. They're kind of the same in video overviews. At least in my test so far, you only get one voice. There's one male voice, one female voice, again different than the ones that are in the audio overviews. But you don't have two different kind of hosts, you know, going back and forth in the video overview. It's more of a presentation style. All right. Also, it can pull information and visuals out from your documents, which is huge. Okay. I've only had it pull out information from my PDFs. I haven't had it pull out information from websites. Right. So if you put a website in there. But that's pretty impressive and something I think you can't overlook. It's customizable as well. You know, as an example, you can in, if you do the video overview, you can click those three dots, click customize and tell it anything. You know, you can say, hey, I'm an expert in X, I want to know more about why. And here's. You know, my company does Z, which is very cool, right? When the first audio overviews came out, you weren't able to customize them. They did eventually allow you to customize audio overviews. So it's pretty cool to see that the, the first iteration of the video overviews, you can customize them by default, and that's huge. So you can tailor it for specific topics, audiences, learning goals for your team, etc. Another new thing, so you have this new updated studio on the right hand side. So our live stream audience saw this and hey, FYI, a lot of people ask this because people watch or listen or probably listen on the YouTube podcast. I don't know why it separates it. So you can always watch the video on the actual YouTube live or on our website if you want to see this. But the Notebook LM Essentially has three different panes or panels, right? So on the left side you have your sources. On the middle, that's where you can chat with all your sources. And now on the right side you have this new revamped studio and that's where you're going to see the video overviews. But there's a couple of new other things as well. So now there's a reports tab that has briefing docs, study guides, FAQs and timelines. You have your mind maps, you have your audio overviews, and you have your video overviews. One of the other biggest things that's actually huge is now you can create multiple versions of any of those things, which is actually a big deal, you know, so previously, you know, you could put in all your content in a notebook and do an audio overview and not customize it. And then you're like, oh man, I should have customized this. Or maybe you end up ending adding more sources or maybe you just weren't happy with how the audio overview turned out. So now you can create multiple of them, which is really cool. The other thing that's new inside of this new studio UI on the right hand side is you can multitask. I love that. So you can listen to an audio overview as an example and then at the same time use the reports tab. You know, bring up a study guide and FAQ and you can interact with those other elements of the studio while also listening to the, to the audio overview. So very cool. You can, you know, generate multiple audio overviews, multiple video overviews, and also multitask. You can interact with those while interacting with other elements. The mind map, the briefing doc, study guide, faq, timeline, etc. All right. Also the other thing, why it's, I think important to be able to generate multiple things as well. What if your team is an international team, right? And you throw in, maybe you've, you know, are onboarding people from a bunch of different companies, maybe you're an hr. And let's say you have a strong presence in South America and North America, right? You can now create multiple versions of this. So let's say you're onboarding people in marketing and you're onboarding people in finance at the same time from North America and South America. You, you could personalize this in four different ways. You could have, you know, marketing for English, marketing for Spanish, and then you could have finance version for English and finance version for Spanish and then you could download those or share these as well. Because you can share these notebooks with your team as long as they all have the same email address. If you are using a workspace account, once this is available to Workspaces. So pretty small. Like people aren't really talking about that update because the videos are really good. So everyone's talking about the video overviews, I think rightfully so. But that, that's some low key big updates that I think is really going to increase the utility of Notebook lm. As if we needed it to like have more utility. Because like I said this, we named Notebook LM our kind of AI tool or feature of the year for 2024. So again, this is something I personally use all the time. I know our audience loves it and you know, you told us so even in our poll yesterday in our newsletter. A couple other updates under the hood and we're going to get back and if you do have questions, please let me know. And we're going to get back and check on our results to see if they're done. So the Streamline Studio panel, it's just the user interface is just a little better. You know, it's easier to work in there. Saves time and boosts productivity. The multitasking support, like I talked about, the ability to listen to audio while exploring other formats and also faster knowledge sharing. So better onboarding for your team, training, global collaboration with the visual summaries. All right, so if you are brand new to NotebookLM or if you're a little confused, what's the difference between NotebookLM and Google Gemini or other large language models like ChatGPT? All right, I'm going to break this down in a very simple way because some people are confused and I get it. And you're like, wait, what's this Notebook lm? It's Google. It's powered by Google Gemini. Like, what's, what's the point? What's the difference? Why would I use Notebook LM vs Google Gemini vs ChatGPT? Here's the big difference. Notebook LM is grounded in your data only. Here's what that means and I'm going to give an example. Okay? So in my example, I just uploaded a bunch of keynote presentations, training documents and websites for your everyday AI. All right, so if I go into Notebook LM and I ask it, what are the top five pizza places in Chicago? Notebook LM is going to spit it out and say, I don't know. This is not in my documents, this is not in my sources. I can't answer that. Right? If I go into Google Gemini or ChatGPT and I upload the same documents in a project Custom GPT, etc, and I ask it, what are the top five pizza places in Chicago? It's going to respond. So that's the difference. Notebook LM is grounded. It's only going to work off of the source information that you give it. All right? And that's very important. All right, so now let's get to five pieces of practical advice. And good thing I'm keeping my eye on our video overview. And it actually finished. Right? So that wasn't bad. Only about. I'm trying to do the math here, maybe about 10 minutes. So pretty fast. Maybe last night they were just getting a little, a little slammed. So here are my five practical pieces of advice for everyday business professionals. How you can use Notebook LM better to grow your company and your career. So number one, we've kind of already referenced these a little bit, but creating multiple assets is huge. Right? In, in, in this example where, you know, I'm personalizing this for a research analyst and essentially I'm using my content to create a video overview of on certain AI trends and hot takes based on my content. But I'm doing it for a research analyst. I can do this for 50 different types of people, multiple languages, doing multiple versions of the video overview, multiple versions of the audio overview. I mean, this is something I'm probably going to start to do, right? I feel I should, you know, be like every day I could take, or maybe once a week take our, our top podcast and personalize it for people in marketing, people in sales, people in HR, etc. Right. I don't have time to personally go through and do that, but with a tool like this, and the results are pretty good, as we'll see here in a second, that is a huge benefit. Number two, multitasking. All right, I don't know about you, but I stink at learning outside of my comfort zone, if that makes sense. The way I like to learn is a combination of visuals, audio in on 2x, right? It's probably bad on me. I. I stink learning live. You know, I've kind of trained my brain to want to be able to consume content quickly, but I need audios and I need visuals, right? Which as much as I love Notebook LM their audio overviews, sometimes it was hard for me and I'm like, okay, what am I staring at? And then my eyes would easily get distracted. Right? All studies show, right? The, the combination of audio and visuals are going to be your best learning mechanism. So being able to both see the video and interact with other content at the same time, you should be doing that. It's going to help things stick. So think whether you're trying to learn something new in your industry, whether your company's making some changes and you want a more personalized or entertaining or interactive way to learn it, you can do that. But also you can interact with those content with the content as well. You can ask questions as you're listening and watching the video. Overview. It is a real boost to be able to multitask. The third one being able to create multiple and unlimited versions. Y', all, you need to be doing this. You need to be doing this, right? Again, I'm using this HR onboarding as an example for bigger companies that are onboarding, you know, hundreds of people a year or thousands of people a year. Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team. Or you can just click on the partner section of our website will help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on Gen AI. I can almost guarantee you your onboarding is probably boring, right? It is not highly personalized, right? If you're doing an onboarding session for 100 new hires, let's just say you can't personalize that. Now you can, you can break this down. Let's say there's, you know, eight different departments that these 100 new hires are in. You can personalize this, right? For their specific information, right? The other thing that I didn't mention as well is you can. And why like have the ability to create unlimited versions is pretty big is you can toggle sources. So let's say you have 20 different sources in there and maybe for your marketing team only 12 of those sources are relevant. So you can just highlight those 12 and then you can create a video overview, and then for your sales team, maybe 18 of those sources are relevant. So again, another way to be able to create customers, unlimited versions that are highly specific and solve a real need. Number four, multiple languages. So you can obviously better connect with team members. If you have clients, potential clients in other countries. I can see people using this almost as like a pitch deck. Right. Especially if, you know, you're working with a company that has a global footprint and you want to be able to interface with them. Right. This is something I run into pretty frequently. Right. We train companies that have a footprint across Europe, South America, Australia. Right. But sometimes there is a little bit of a language barrier. And for. To be able to create this in different languages is actually huge. All right. Actually don't know what's going on. My video overview had just said that it was done. Now it says it's not, but I have my other one done and ready to go, so we'll see if it finishes here in the next two minutes. And then number five, being able to pull visuals from your uploaded docs, that's big, right? These videos, being able to pull information from your PDFs, your visuals, and it can create visuals on its own, too. So it's not going to have the same exact look and feel of the, you know, PDFs that you upload, but it's going to be familiar enough. Right. And in my experience, it does a pretty good job weaving together the video overviews, weaving together a very strong narrative that tells a great story, and then also interjecting with your own visuals. That's big. All right, let's go ahead. Let's check back. Let's check back, shall we? Actually, I'm gonna give it another minute. Let me see if we have any questions here. Jackie said she created one yesterday to do an overview of my digital marketing class syllabus. The audio was way better than the video. Video was a little glitchy. Yeah, I've done. I've done a couple tests so far. I've. I've had a couple that the. The video was great. I've had some where it's a little glitchy. Same thing. Let's see. Any. Any other questions? I don't think so. Okay. Robert. What's up, Robert? Robert says multilingual onboarding and training videos are very cool. Great time Saver. Gavin from YouTube asking, Is it comparable to a local model in the sense of needing to train the model yourself so you're not really training the model. So it does use Gemini 2.5 flash. So it uses Google Gemini's model, a very fast and capable model, in a hybrid model as well. So it can think and reason. It is the Flash version, so it's fast. So you're never going to be waiting two or three minutes for a response from NotebookLM. So yeah, you're actually getting the advantage of using one of the most powerful models in the world that powers it, but it is grounded in just your data. All right, Joe says I can envision this as a lead magnet or pre sales tool personalized by industry or even client business. Yeah, both. Probably personalize it via both. So great, great call out there, Joe. All right, let's go ahead. Let's check in live. It looks like, unfortunately, even though a couple of minutes ago it said it was done, it doesn't look like it's done. Wait, did it, did it just finish? Sometimes, FYI, if you're waiting a while, sometimes I refresh my browser and then it shows it as being done. But it looks like in this case. All right, we're gonna have to check. Check that one out in the newsletter. All right, so let's go ahead. And I did have one already done. All right, so let's check this one out. And live stream audience, if you could let me know if you can hear the audio, that would be great. So again, this is the exact same thing, except this version is not personalized. Everything else is the exact same. I was hoping it would be able to finish in the, you know, 15 or so minutes. But hey, we gotta wrap this. We can't let this one go on for hours. So you'll see here again we have our three different panels. You can collapse the left hand panel for your sources, FYI, you can also collapse the studio panel in this case. I don't want to. So you'll see right here now we have our video overview. You can go click the more button, you can rename it, you can download it, you can share it, but if you are on a workspace plan, you can only, I believe, share it in a collaborative nature with people that are on the same workspace account and then you can delete it as well. So again, if I were to create multiple versions of this, they're all going to show up here on the right hand side in the studio. So I'm going to go ahead, click the play button, all right? And then I'm going to expand this to full screen. All right, so live stream audience, please let me know if you can hear this. But for our podcast audience, we have a video here. It's ready to go. Has a real, real cool and everything. FYI, it is Notebook LM branded. On every single slide, you're going to see a little Notebook lm, FYI and yeah, let's go ahead. We're going to listen to a minute or two of this. But a really cool cover slide. It gave it a title. It said, Top 5 AI hot takes on the future of work. A little robot. Cool, cool designs. The design's very minimalistic, but very clean. The designs are very clean, which I like. It's not super clunky. All right, live stream audience, I'm hitting play. Let me know if you can hear.

Hey, everyone, and welcome. So let's be real, if your feed is anything like mine, it is just a constant fire hose of AI news, AI promises, and honestly, a little bit of AI panic. Today we're going to cut through all that noise. We've got five provocative, maybe even a little controversial hot takes on how AI is really changing the future of work. So, yeah, let's just dive right in. I mean, you're hearing it from the absolute top. You've got tech leaders like the CEO of Nvidia basically declaring that the age of agentic AI has arrived.

Okay, I'm going to pause this. I think live stream audience can hear this. So what happened here is on the second kind of slide, it. It actually pulled a screenshot from one of my presentations that I gave last week. So FYI, that's what's happening here. But then it added its own design elements, so pretty cool. Let's go ahead and listen to another, maybe 90 seconds.

We're talking about AI that's designed to think, to plan, and to act all on its own. The message is pretty clear. The hype train has left the station. But is AI everyone on that train selling real gold? Well, this is where things get interesting. Because what if a lot of what you're seeing as impressive as it is, isn't really agentic at all? What if it's more like a really, really clever magic trick? And that brings us right to our very first hot take. Okay, I know, I know. That is a huge claim. But the term AI agent has become the hottest buzzword in tech and. And it's created this epidemic of agent washing. And when you look at the actual numbers, it's kind of staggering. So let's not just read the slide. Let's talk about what this really means. Gartner looked into this and found this massive disconnect.

Why?

Well, because most Companies are just slapping the AI agent label on what are basically just slick automations. You know, think of it this way.

All right, so we went through about a minute and a half. If I'm going to share the personalized version of this in the newsletter that you can go listen to or download or watch. And we'll see how similar it is to this non personalized version. But for our podcast audience, the design is actually really clean. So Jackie did point out here that there is a slight jump or glitch between slides. Sometimes I'm seeing that, sometimes I'm not. FYI And Ruth here, great, great observation, says great, good script reading and dramatic pause for the win. Joe says he's already intrigued. Right. Like I like this. I'm probably going to be doing this all the time and just dump a lot of my better podcast episodes in and just use this almost to, for myself to learn and remind myself. I know that sounds weird. One of my biggest issues I face. And hey, we're talking about putting AI to work for. For your you on Wednesday. I forget a lot, right? I do this every single day sometimes, you know, there'll be a great, you know, point that a guest made a couple of months ago that I might forget or because I'm doing so many shows myself, I might forget a certain stat, something like that. So I'm probably going to be using this a lot just to ideate and to continue to learn the content that I'm already out there, you know, putting out into the world. So very from a design perspective. Again, what they did here, a little screenshot of something from one of my presentations and then a nice animation and additional kind of visuals that they created as well. So it's not just, you know, a sloppy pulling things from your documents. They actually do a good job at incorporating their design and your design. And then there's instances, I'm going to fast forward here a little bit where they just will do. Let me see here. I want to be able to show, obviously I'm getting some, some buffering issues.

That the AI can use.

Okay, so here we go. Here's an example where it just pulls out. This isn't a quote. It says AI can now create editable PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets without a Microsoft Office license. And it highlighted PowerPoint and Excel. That's not a direct quote, but that is from a transcript. And put a nice design with some emojis. Right? So it does a really good job. It can also, it does create its own charts, its own graphs here's another one where it broke down. It even reframed a lot of the content that I originally built. So overall, really good. So let's wrap this one up. And again, if you want to see the personalized version, we're going to be sharing that in the newsletter today. But as we wrap up what's New video overviews, they're I think extremely impressive and are not just going to change the way that you can learn and personalize, but I think the way that we're going to interact with others as well. Right? Imagine instead of, you know, sending someone an email, a long email, or a bunch of PowerPoints or, you know, old videos that your company produced three years ago, imagine instead of sending them something highly personalized, highly engaging that just feels right to them. I think that this new video overview solves so many problems and it opens up so many opportunities for how we can grow our companies and our careers. Thank you for tuning in. Hope this was helpful. If so, please let us know. Please share this if you're listening online. If this was helpful. If you're on the podcast, please leave us a rating and subscribe to the show. Then go to your everyday AI.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter. Thank you for tuning in. Hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more. Every day. AI. Thanks y'. All.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everyday AI.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.