Step 3: Chatting with the bot

Finally, ask the chatbot any question you want regarding the sources uploaded. You can even upload multiple sources, and select or deselect the ones you want or don't want to include when asking the bot a specific question.

Step 4: Studio (Optional)

Open the Studio panel to turn your notebook sources into interactive study materials.

• Audio Overview: Click Generate to create a podcast-style discussion between two AI hosts based on your uploaded sources. Before generating, you can refine the focus (e.g., exam review, key themes, debates). After it’s created, you can ask follow-up questions or use the interactive (beta) feature to guide the speakers and steer the conversation in real time.

• Video Overview: Generate a short visual explainer summarizing the most important ideas from your sources.

• Mind Map: Create a visual map of key concepts and their connections to support big-picture understanding.

• Flashcards: Automatically produce study cards grounded strictly in your uploaded materials.

• Quiz: Generate comprehension questions to check understanding.

• Infographic (Beta): Transform complex content into a structured visual summary.

• Slide Deck (Beta): Create an editable presentation outline based on your notebook.

• Reports & Data Table: Produce structured summaries or extract and organize key data from your sources.

Opinions on this tool and its impact on education

Both D’Alessio (2025) and Forte (2025) emphasize NotebookLM’s strengths, highlighting its ability to synthesize up to 50 sources, generate structured outputs such as study guides and FAQs, and create customizable Audio Overviews grounded in cited material. Forte (2025) further describes it as a “tool for understanding,” stressing its large context window and multimodal support for PDFs, websites, and videos, while D’Alessio (2025) showcases its practical productivity applications. However, a notable limitation is that NotebookLM remains web-only. As reported by Krol (2025) in Android Police, Google has confirmed that a dedicated mobile app is on the way, meaning that at present users must access the tool through a browser rather than a native Android or iOS application.