Supercharge Learning with NotebookLM

By Cheryl Kay Johnson

Can AI really make learning stick and be fun? Let’s put technology to the test and see how might this work in action.

Imagine you have a complex task or topic you need to understand, but you’re short on time for extensive reading. My experience with NotebookLM and Gemini 2.5 Pro offer a way to streamline this process. I have found it to be this combination to be the ultimate tool for understanding things.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is noted for being faster, smarter, powerful, and particularly strong in its coding ability using canvas mode. To me the best part is that it’s free to use.

By combining NotebookLM for gathering, processing, and structuring information from sources with Gemini 2.5 Pro for transforming that information into actionable outputs like visualizations and interactive tools, you can significantly cut down on research time and uncover deeper insights.

This outlines a practical approach a person might take:

1. Curate your learning sources in NotebookLM

The workflow begins in NotebookLM by collecting your study materials. You create a new notebook for your project.

NotebookLM has a Discover Sources feature that allows you to input your research topic. It searches for and suggests relevant and credible top articles, videos, PDFs, and other content.

The system is designed to prioritize authoritative sources from reputable brands and find credible materials. You can refine searches by specifying source types like YouTube videos, content from consulting firms, specific brands, or file formats like PDF.

After reviewing suggestions, you can deselect unsuitable sources and import the desired ones, ensuring successful import. You can also manually add sources like links to websites or YouTube videos, upload files like PDFs or Google Docs, or paste text directly into the notebook. This allows you to bring in external information or your own internal notes, thoughts, or journal entries as source material.

NotebookLM can even process complex information embedded in images and slides, such as diagrams, charts, and photographs.

2. Generate an audio overview

Once sources are imported, a unique feature is the ability to generate an audio overview. NotebookLM can create a personalized podcast conversation between two knowledgeable hosts based on the content of your sources.

This is particularly helpful for those who prefer to learn by listening rather than reading. It provides a kind of superficial surface-level survey of the landscape, helping you understand the relevant topics and even figure out what questions to ask next.

This conversation can be generated from both external sources like articles and videos, or internal sources like your personal journal entries.

Listening to a conversation about your own reflections can offer an interesting, objective, outsider perspective on your life or experiences, serving as a powerful tool for personal growth.

You can even enter an interactive mode to join the conversation yourself and interject new information or ask for adjustments, such as tailoring travel plans for a family with young kids. The AI-generated conversation is designed to be realistic and customized based on your instructions.

You can download the audio file if needed for later steps.

3. Explore & structure information within NotebookLM

Beyond listening, NotebookLM offers several ways to engage with your sources.

You can use the chat panel to ask specific questions about the content. A key feature for ensuring trustworthiness is source grounding and inline citations.

When NotebookLM provides an answer, it includes little numbers that, when clicked, take you directly to the exact part of the original source the information came from. This helps you verify the AI’s responses and combat hallucination.

You can also generate structured documents based on your sources, such as a Study Guide, a briefing document, an FAQ, or a timeline. These pre-made options help organize the information from your sources into useful formats.

As you interact with the AI and get valuable answers or insights, you can click a “save to note” button. These notes are collected in the Studio panel and act like the final output or the “gems” you want to take away from your research, creating almost a repository of evergreen insights.

NotebookLM’s ability to handle a massive amount of source material is enabled by its expanded context window. It can process millions of words across numerous sources simultaneously. This allows you to point the AI at a large collection of information and let it do the work of finding connections, summarizing, and analyzing, freeing you from needing to meticulously read and organize everything yourself. This expanded memory is likened to a great teacher who can follow the thread of a topic, reference past conversations, and help plan your learning journey.

4. Visualize concepts with a mind map

Another powerful feature in NotebookLM is the ability to instantly create a visual mind map based on the content of your imported sources. This map gives you a holistic visual overview of how different concepts are interconnected within your topic.

You click the mind map feature to generate it, and nodes can often be expanded to reveal further related concepts. Clicking on a node can sometimes take you back to the relevant source material or prompt NotebookLM to provide more detail about that specific concept. This offers a structured way to explore the subject matter. The mind map can be downloaded as an image (like a PNG) for external use, such as in the next step.

5. Transform insights into interactive resources using Gemini 2.5 Pro Canvas

This is where Gemini 2.5 Pro, particularly in its canvas mode, becomes a powerful execution engine, especially for those without coding skills.

Create interactive learning quizzes

Based on the structured information or even the raw content from your NotebookLM sources, you can generate interactive quizzes.

Copy the relevant text from NotebookLM, open Gemini 2.5 Pro in canvas mode (available via the Gemini app or Google AI Studio), paste the text, and prompt Gemini to turn it into interactive learning quizzes.

Gemini can quickly generate fully functional quizzes, often structured by modules that align with how you might have organized information in NotebookLM. These can be shared via a canvas link, allowing others to access and use them in a web browser.

However, for full functionality, especially features like export buttons, it might be necessary to copy the generated code and run it locally or in a hosted environment, as Google may block the execution of some code directly from the canvas link.

Transform mind maps into interactive topic cluster visualizations

You can take the mind map generated in NotebookLM and create a more interactive visualization in Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Generate the mind map in NotebookLM, expand nodes for detail, and download it as an image file. Then, in Gemini 2.5 Pro within Google AI Studio, upload the mind map image. Add a prompt asking Gemini to build a topic cluster visualization using the mind map, showing how concepts are related within your topic.

Gemini can process the image and prompt to build an interactive concept map, showing key pillars and their interconnections. This visualization can be applied to any topic and can also be shared with others via its unique canvas URL.

Build product prototypes or landing pages

Another use case involves researching market needs, exploring pain points, features, or competitor strategies in NotebookLM and then using those insights to guide Gemini 2.5 Pro in generating code for functional product prototypes or landing pages.

You’d research the relevant information in NotebookLM (using Discover Sources for trends, user feedback forums, competitor analysis, etc., and uploading your own research data), ask NotebookLM to synthesize the key findings (e.g., unmet needs, requested features, language patterns), copy the summary, and paste it into Gemini 2.5 Pro canvas.

You can then prompt Gemini to build a prototype or landing page, providing design inspiration (like a screenshot) and instructing it to incorporate the specific insights from NotebookLM into the design, features, and messaging. This allows you to quickly transform research findings into functional mock-ups.

Convert audio to script and generate new audio

The audio overview generated in NotebookLM can be downloaded. You can then upload this audio file into Google AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 Pro to extract a full transcript. This works for any audio file or even YouTube videos.

Once you have the transcript, you can prompt Gemini to repurpose it, for example, converting a two-person podcast transcript into a first-person script for a single host. You can then copy this script and use a feature like Stream Realtime in AI Studio to have an AI voice read the script aloud, creating a ready-to-use audio file.

6. Optional collaboration & advanced features (NotebookLM Plus)

For those of you working in teams or needing higher limits, NotebookLM offers a paid tier called NotebookLM Plus. This version may provide an even larger context window, higher usage limits for features like audio overviews and notebook creation, and chat modes that allow you to assign specific personalities or roles to the AI (like an analyst or guide) or define your own custom persona.

Crucially for teams, the Plus version enables collaboration, allowing you to share entire notebooks, including sources and saved notes, or share a chat-only version, enabling others to interact with the custom AI you’ve set up via a shareable link using their own free NotebookLM account.

A powerful solution

In summary, I have found that this integrated workflow leverages NotebookLM’s strengths in credible source discovery, information processing, concept mapping, and structuring information with Gemini 2.5 Pro’s power in execution, coding, and visualization.

It moves from understanding source material through audio overviews and mind maps to transforming those insights into interactive learning materials, visualizations, and even code for web elements, aiming to facilitate a more structured, efficient, and engaging approach to learning, research, and knowledge creation. The emphasis on NotebookLM’s ability to curate quality sources ensures that the powerful capabilities of Gemini 2.5 Pro are applied to reliable information. 

Image credit: everything bagel