It all depends on who you are when it comes to what are the most effective ways for you to study. Some people have incredible discipline and will sit down and study whenever they need to. Others need a quiet room without their phone or other people to get even the slightest bit of studying done. Maybe they can sit and focus and don’t mind having noise around them. Maybe their lack of attention is so severe, they need a specific kind of music to lock in.
I’m definitely more in the ” need classical music and nobody talking to me while my phone is somewhere else” camp and have been for a long time. I get distracted too easily and sometimes find it hard to focus on things I find mundane, even if I absolutely need to complete them. It can be hard to get yourself into the right mindset when you’re trying to study, especially with all the stimuli that can be around you at any time.
I have often relied on NotebookLM to get me prepared for lots of tasks. It could be planning my family’s travel, getting ready to take a test for a program I’m doing, or just trying to understand a hobby better. The latest NotebookLM feature offers a connection to just about any user, as it gives you the power to choose how it interacts with you. I mean you actually get to choose how it writes to you.
Choose the language for your chat
You can make it be anyone you want
When you’re using NotebookLM, you can use as many of its features as you’d like to help you gain a better understanding of the topic it’s researching. What I mean is that there are loads of tools that are at your disposal, such as Mind Map, Video Overview, quizzes, or flash cards, that can be used to assist you in your learning. You can use all of them or none of them. It’s up to you.
NotebookLM, at its core, is an AI assistant that will take the information that you input into it and help you by summarizing it or providing answers based on it. It is your own database, based on the sources that you choose. While you can have Google use its immense computing power to look up sources, it’s more meant to pull from the information you ask it to in order to provide you with the most comprehensive feedback based on it.
So, after you input sources when you’ve started a new Notebook, (this is the first thing that pops up when you open a new one,) it will give you a short synopsis of the topic in the middle Chat area. That’s where you can ask questions and the tool will scan the sources you’ve given it to be able to answer you. One of the newest features is that you can now choose how the tool responds to one of your chat questions. By clicking the Configure Notebook button at the top of the middle section, you’ll see a window that populates called Configure Chat. This is where the fun begins.
Have it talk to you like a child
Seriously, it works pretty well
You can choose Default and the chat will talk to you like it always has. If you’re new to NotebookLM, it will provide a decent level of detail while not going into technical details. It’s a bit more in-depth than a broad overview would be. That’s because you can listen to overviews in either audio or visual formats. Learning Guide is another option. It’s meant for more educational purposes, especially with denser topics. If you’re trying to learn more about a larger area, this is a good option to pick.
The one that I like to use is Custom. This lets you choose the kind of voice NotebookLM responds to your chats in. For a recent exercise, I loaded in sources about all of Dan Brown’s books with the character Robert Langdon in them. He’s written six, so I added seven sources that touched on the books. While I have read five of them, I haven’t read the newest one and wanted a quick refresher on what happened in the previous ones. But, I decided to test out just how accurate the Custom chat could be.
My prompt was:
Talk to me as though I’m a 10 year old just learning how to grasp full novels. Be as vague about the plots as you can while still explaining who Robert Langdon is. Use dumbed-down language and speak to me like I’m a child. Explain deeply where each book takes place.
That’s exactly what it did.
NotebookLM’s customization is really impressive
It gives you what you want
I was impressed with how focused the NotebookLM response was when my first Chat question was “What are the Robert Langdon books about?” It took my custom tone and delivered a response filled with exclamation points, extra adjectives, and simple language. For example, “Imagine having a job where all you do is study mysterious, old-timey symbols, like the kind you see in old pictures, on buildings, or in secret codes. That’s Langdon’s job! He’s a professor of symbology at a big university called Harvard.”
The AI brain of NotebookLM can deliver lengthy or brief responses, depending on your preference. I switched up the tone and asked it to respond to my prompts with “responses that are highly intellectual that put an emphasis on using advanced words for explanation. There should be some spelling bee words used in the responses.” Part of the response I got read “Ultimately, the entire concatenation of events and the race through this real-world labyrinth accelerates Langdon toward a singularity: the uncovering of a ‘single, inconceivable truth'”. While I’m not saying this should be used for anything other than study purposes, you can use it to talk to you on a number of levels.
NotebookLM continues to level up its features to provide users with the kind of learning opportunities they crave. It is a useful tool that has valuable customizable sections to help with all kinds of prep. I’ll continue to use NotebookLM for a lot of my summarizing and learning, especially since it can now talk to me like I’m 10 again.
