FridAI - NotebookLM

Business brain, episode 631 for Casual Friday, March 14, PI Day. Also National Legal Assistance Day and National legal assistance day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas and we dissect them, we analyze them, we use them to tune our business brains so that we can each do a better job of leading our charmed lives today than we did yesterday. And also tomorrow versus today. And the whole thing goes on. Shopify.com businessbrain is where you're going to go. They are a sponsor for this episode. You can sign up for their $1 per month trial period and we'll talk more about that in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, at least when I'm recording this, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. Happy to be here. Happy Friday. I.

Happy Friday. I. My friend. Yep, absolutely.

Yes.

I. I can't take credit for my submission to Friday AI, or at least not for coming up with the idea, but it's brilliant. You know, in chat GPT, you can create your own GPTs of things so that it focuses and sort of learns in that particular bubble. And a Macgeekab listener suggested this. Upload. Create a GPT and then upload all of the PDFs from all of the user manuals, from all the stuff that you own.

Oh, my gosh.

I know.

Stop right there.

Right, Stop, stop. Now. It's your tech support assistant, but it's correct because it's trained properly. It's not just looking at the Internet at large and coming up with trying to synthesize things and getting it wrong. Most of the time, it's like that option doesn't exist. What are you talking about? Yeah, no, train it.

Yeah, yeah. Are guys like. Are companies like iFixit? Do you think they do that? Well, their businesses?

They should. I mean, with any customer service department, if you're not using AI for your customer service, start tomorrow, like immediately, because you can upload all of your previous customer service ticket history.

Right.

And instantly it's trained, like.

Yeah, amazing.

Like the train. You've already done the work to train it by answering people's questions. Just upload them and you're done.

Yeah, that's huge.

Yes. Yeah, I know.

That's crazy.

Yeah. The user manual thing is killer.

Yeah. The user. So I was trying to think other things that. Yeah, that's crazy. All the PDFs, all the things I.

And then put it. When you need to solve a problem, go into voice mode and tell it, hey, I need you to help me solve this issue with my dishwasher or whatever. Right?

Yeah.

Give me each step one at a time and wait for me to tell you to give me the next step. And now you've got an assistant.

Could I. Yeah. Do you think you could do it? Like, I'm thinking about this for like my content business. Could I upload every piece of content? Well, maybe I don't need to if I use Grok, I guess, but if you uploaded the full articles of everything you've written, you could go back and say, hey, I want to create. Help me pull data from that and present it in a different way. Right. Or try. Yeah, I.

What I want to do. And I actually had a conversation with Chat GPT about this the other day and it did not have an answer for me yet. Although I might be under NDA about a product that's coming that might do this.

Don't do it. Don't NDA yourself.

No, no, it's totally fine. What I want, because I talked about this on my other show before any anything came to came up, but what I want is I want it to be better trained on me.

Yes.

So if I am okay with relinquishing the privacy of what I'm about to describe, then I want some AI engine that I can upload the entirety of my email archive. Now, that's not everything about me, but it's in terms of one source of data. One store, one easily digestible clump of data, man, it's structured, it's there and it's dated. It's got two, you know, who it came from, who it went to and like I. And there's nothing currently that exists to be able to do that. But like if you keep all your email in Gmail, I can't imagine that we're not.

Yeah, Gemini. Why? Gemini ought to be able to just go in there and tell you, I think.

And that's not what I'm under NDA about. Like, yeah, yeah, real soon now, I would assume Gemini is going to be able to do that for you, I hope.

Like, yeah, I would think so. I want to do something like here with the podcast. I would like to be able to. I've mentioned it to you where, hey, I want the 600 episodes, 630 episodes we've done. I want to put them on some device that I can leave my, you know, give to my kids so they have us talking for 10 years. Not that they want to listen, but something.

But Index it for them.

Yeah, index. So where they could pull it up about a topic and. And hear us talk about it.

And as nice as that is, as a legacy for our kids. What about for you, our audience, right now? We would like that.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, I like it. I have of. Yeah, well, I have the opposite of that. I want to talk about that for my Friday. AI.

All right. So you know that we're all about working smarter, not harder. And that's exactly why I use our sponsor, Shopify, to sell merch for my other businesses and podcasts. Seriously, it's so easy. I barely remember setting it up. It happened all in one day. In fact, the first time I used it, from having the idea at a staff meeting in the morning to selling our first product by the end of the day, it's like Shopify just read my mind, built my store, and whispered, go forth and sell. Shopify gives you the best and me the best checkout experience on the planet. And Shopify pay boost conversions by up to 50%, meaning fewer abandoned carts and more cha ching moments. Whether your customers are scrolling, strolling, or impulse Buying at 2am, Shopify makes sure they can click Buy now wherever they are. And listen, if Shopify were a person, I'd hire it as my cfo, my coo, and possibly my life coach. It's that good. So if you're ready to upgrade your business and start living that charmed, entrepreneurial life, upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com businessbrain all lowercase. Go to shopify.com businessbrain to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. All right, what, what, what is your Friday?

AI So I talked about this last year, but it's gotten so much better that I thought I'd mention again. And that is Google's Notebook lm.

Okay?

And it does a bunch of stuff and it uses some Gemini. But one of the things that I really like is, you know, we've done Audi, everybody does audio, and then we have transcripts and creates documents and everything. So this is the opposite. You take your PDFs, your articles, your anything, and put it up and upload it to Notebook and it will create audio for you. And in a couple of different ways, it will create audio or it'll understand it enough to where you can, you know, how obviously have a discussion with it. But what I love about it is it will have a discussion by itself. So if you have an article that you wrote and I did an entire book, I Upgrade uploaded a 250 page book and it created an 18 minute discussion between two AI voice. You know, that sounds supernatural. Yeah, I think I shared it with you last year, Dave.

Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, it was decent back, sounded somewhat natural, but it was informative.

It's very informative and it just allows you to present your stuff in a different way. Whether it's a product description on your website, if you want have somebody sitting there talking and explaining how your product works and you don't have to create that, that you've already got the text and everything. It's amazing. I've used it a bunch of different times. The, the most use use case for me is taking articles I've written, posts I've written, converting it to audio and into a discussion and then using that somewhere else. It's just repurposing that content. I think it's great. I definitely think it's worth checking out.

Huh?

No, no, it's a, you can get it just search Notebook lm. It's a Google product and it's, I, I, I think it's worthwhile. Check it out. And audio like they call it audio. One of the things they promise audio study guides.

Okay, I'm glad you said that because the question I was going to ask is like why would I want to do that? But now I get it. Okay.

Audio overview can turn your sources into engaging deep dive discussions with one click. So if you've got this white paper that you really like, but you want to present it to people where they can listen to it in their car or on the subway on the way to work. So I can't. Here you go. Here's a discussion about this concept.

Yeah.

And it breaks it down. It's very, I think it's very natural the way that it's, it's, yeah, I.

Should, I should clarify my sort of objection before. It is extremely natural if you accept and know going in that it was created by AI and to be fair, I haven't messed with it in probably six or eight months. So yeah, I'm sure it's more natural now. But it, yes, initially people were not you, but other people were like, oh, this is going to be great. It can just build our podcast for us. And I listen. It was like, well yes, if you make sure people know that it's AI and then it's, then it's fine. It's like, okay, great.

So you could have if you sent an email out like, like one of the ways I use. I use Loom all the time. They have their. We'll talk about that their AI in a future episode. But yeah, I answer emails with Looms all the time. If somebody sends me an email with like a paragraph of stuff, I'm not going to type that out. I just jump on Loom. I have their email in the background as the video or the as thing. And I talk and I say, hey, this is what's going on here today. You could, you can use Notebook LM in a similar fashion. If you have a bunch of content you want to present and to people are not going to read it too long. Didn't read.

Yeah, right.

You try, try using this way.

Oh yeah, no, I love this idea of coming up with and this. Over the years people have tried to solve this problem in many different ways of taking articles that you want to read but you haven't and then delivering them as audio content. Right. You know, and for a while it was just like, well, we'll have some robotic voice just read the article to you. It's terrible. Yeah, this is a. Is the best version of that so far by far.

Yeah, yeah, I would agree.

Yeah, I agree. I gotta, I gotta use this more.

Yeah, you gotta check it out. It's specialized. It's kind of like we talked about Grok being really good with if you're using X as a data source. Right.

Yeah.

It's just here if you're going to, you know, do this. And I love the audio feature built in chat GPT2. This is just different. It presents it back to you in a different way.

Well, it's meant to be. It's meant to just be passively consumed.

Correct.

Versus the Chat GPT audio is interactive. I did notice a very, to me valuable thing about chat GPT's audio interactions because I do it a lot and when I started doing it and up until very recently, you know, I would ask it a question or whatever and it would give me, you know, the answer and then we would start going back and forth. Right. Like that's what we do. And if you haven't done that, maybe now you'll start or maybe not. I had because I'm used to conversing with humans and not robots. I had gotten into a habit or just been in the habit and it carried over to Chat GPT that when it replied to me, I'm alone in my car driving, using ChatGPT, when it replied to me, I would feel an obligation to reply to it quickly. And there was something we were going through, and I went to reply, and before I said any words, I stopped myself and I was like, I'm not sure how I want to formulate this. And so I just sat and thought about it for a minute or two and then gave my okay. Hey, that's great. What if we look at it this way? And I had collected my thoughts, I knew how I wanted to prompt it. Of course, I've been using ChatGPT for several years, so I've learned what it's good at responding to and that sort of thing. But that freedom of not being obligated to respond immediately, it turns out, is super powerful. And now I use it all the time where it's like. And sometimes I'll forget that I have a session open. Like, I'll forget that I need to give it a reply. I'll know that there's a session open, but I'll be, you know, I'll stop. Okay. Yep. And I'll just start cogitating and driving and sort of, you know, day drifting and dreaming like you do when you drive a little, and letting that sort of, you know, background process percolation happen.

Yeah.

And then it's like, ah, now I know what I want to ask it next. You know, it's like you're 10 minutes after you've had a conversation with someone, you're like, dang it, I had a perfect comeback for that. Or a perfect reply. Well, now you get waiting. It doesn't care.

Doesn't care.

It doesn't care.

Do you say. Do you say thank you?

I do say thank you to it.

I do, too. Yeah, I think that helps.

Well, I also. They say it doesn't matter.

I know, but I feel like when.

Our robot overlords take over, they may go back the history of those of us that were polite to it. And I love it. And it's. I. The reason I keep doing it is to stay in the habit of being polite. Of course, it's not as much. It is a little bit about the robots, I'm not gonna lie. But it's also. I know, like, I know just how valuable saying please and thank you are. It costs you nothing and buys far more than I can ever articulate. Look at my life. I really, truly think that being polite and considerate. And I'm not. I fail at it all the time, too. But, you know, attempting to be polite and considerate as much as I possibly can has. Has gotten me everything that I have in life.

I agree. Yeah, that's great. It's awesome. Well, if you have some AI that we're missing out on feedbackusinessbrain show, let us know so we can share it here and then leave us a review. BusinessBrain show review. When you enter your review, you'll be entered to win a MacBook that we're giving away this year.

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