notebook LM has got some awesome upgrades but are they as good as people say they are they kind of are they kind of aren't this is what I think so if we head over to notebook LM you can see it's got a new look audio interactivity and a premium version so as we scroll down here you know it's got a new look we'll talk about that in a minute um but ultimately this is what I'm interested in where it says you can create a new audio overview and then you tap the interactive mode while listening
tap join and the host will call on you then you can ask your question and people are saying it's kind of like the ability to put yourself into the podcast that notebook LM creates I think it is a little bit more complicated than that and maybe not as impressive as I first thought it would be but let's take a look at how this can be used for Academia and research so if you head over to notebook LM this is what it looks like you can see I've been playing about with it down here but ultimately
this is um a way of putting loads of sources into a tiny kind of like large language model that's trained on your data and then you can ask questions about it it produces a podcast you can now ask the podcast uh hosts questions but it all starts with creating a new notebook so here we can see create new you click here and then you get a nice new um notebook but first of all it asks you to upload sources sources are very important you've got a load of things you can do there's so many ways
so the first way is to upload just your files and this is really great for Academia because you can put all of your PDFs you can put all of the resources you've got you can put all of the white papers you can EAS even put in a Google Docs um like um file or a Google Slides file so if you've got um uh presentations from a a lecture that you attended or a conference that you went to you could even ask questions about that and put it into its knowledge base then we've got links we've
got websites we've got YouTube and also you can just sort of like if all of that fails the default uh sort of fallback is copy text where you can just put in a load of text and uh you could put your lab notes but I don't suggest you put anything that's uh needs to be kept secret in there just at the moment but uh yeah this is where you put it up so if I put in a load of files like this what it will do is upload them and then you get this three panel
layout so you've got all of the sources that get put here then you've got kind of the chat bot and that's where you can kind of ask questions about all of the resources or all of the sources that you've put up and you can see if you click add Source again you can put up to 50 sources which is just incredible in the past this would cost so much money to ask questions about um a load of research all together like it's super complicated because you take all of the sources you have to store them
somewhere then you have to ask questions then the AI to go for anyway it's just complicated this just makes it so very very easy and you can do it with up to 50 things which is just incredible so here you can see that they're all uploaded apart from my thesis which is uh much much much bigger but then ultimately you get this in the chat part you can see that it gives you kind of like a little headline and then nine sources and a little quick summary of what that means you can then save this
to a note so you click here and then it will save it to a note down here we'll talk about notes in a minute and then uh one thing I like about this is that you've got all of your sources on that side but if you click on the sources you also get like a source uh summary and a few sort of like key topics that it talks about so I really like this this is the full kind of text that it's pulled in from the PDF down the bottom but this is the little summary
down here and you can see here tip to surface interactions Imaging Sands and surface chemistry it's got little things that are highlighted and bolded so overall this is just like a nice way to be like oh what's that one I forgot what it talks about and it gives you a nice little summary I really like that so not only do you get the ability to chat with all of these you also get the ability to um chat individually or at least see a summary not chat but see a summary with all of these if you
just click on them which is really great there's the source guide it pops up so you can get a little bit granular which I really really like let's get rid of that all right now this is where it gets really really exciting so I've got loads of stuff here but I want to ask questions from that sort of knowledge base that I've created of these sources so here we can just quickly create a little sort of like question and it will ask and give references on those sources let's have a look so I've asked one
of the best solar cells from these sources I'm going to click here and you can see I'm asking nine sources which is great and it will go away it'll ask that question of all those things and put it into a nice little summary absolutely love it but we do have to play the AI waiting game not that long perfect and now it gives me this response where I've got all of the different stuff I've got this uh response and it's all reference so I can click it it takes me to the source and also it
takes me to the part of the source where it actually found that information so you can double check where it's getting that information from and you should because down the bottom there's this tiny tiny tiny little bit of text which says notebook LM can be inaccurate please double check its responses so it's always good just to check that it's not hallucinating but it shouldn't do it as much as other large language models um and you can see here it's giving me you know a pce so a power current efficiency power conversion efficiency oh how dare
I um up to 0.5 have been fabricated this one's up to 1% so it has actually given me the information that I want it's highlighted it in bullet point so I absolutely love that and then we can say save that to note and that puts it over here in the notes panel we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail in a minute but that is really great you can see it gives you more questions down here and then here we go the Pista resistance the thing we've all been waiting for the audio overview
now it's a little bit more complicated than last time I showed you this because last time you just click generate and then you just had sort of like the default conversation between two podcast hosts but here you can actually now customize it a little bit which is great because now you can give it some context how deep it needs to go what sort of information you're actually interested in so here it said What should the AI host focus on and it gives you some options focus on a specific Source um focus on a specific topic
so I've actually just said focus on the use case of the solar cells and the best efficiency so let's generate that and it will take a little bit of time to generate that but ultimately it's just a little bit of waiting around but you can go away do other things while this is generating and it says here this may take a few minutes no need to stick around let's have a look to see the sort of um information that's important for you to know and that is that here the audio overviews are AI generated so
there are audio glitches well that's fine we don't mind about that but ultimately it's here audio overviews and not a comprehensive or objective view of a topic but simply a reflection of your sources so if all of your sources say these solar C are the best in the world that's all it's going to talk about there's no fact checking outside of it so you do have to be a little bit careful and uh yeah this is what you need to know really in here but overall it's just a really nice way to consume information from
a load of different sources now we just wait bought a 3D printer and printed a Croc but it's not very squishy so it's just a bit of artwork at the moment but it's not too bad is it I used to do a podcast called publish parisha podcast um with friends go check it out it's still around online it was really fun we got like 100 episodes and it was all about Academia go check it out I got into leather work recently I made this for my passport when I'm traveling so look at that that's pretty
good is it and the stitching oh nice and detailed and inside it holds a pen and it folds flat that's good is it I made that there's part of me that really wants to learn how to make shoes so I bought these shoe lasts from a shoe maker and yeah they kind of like I haven't done anything with them yet I think I'm more obsessed with the idea of it than the actual sort of like you then the actual kind of uh reality of what it takes to actually build a shoe but nonetheless uh they're
there they're pretty cool they just sit on my desk Now remind me of those bad decisions I made this is taking way longer than before bought a dumb phone because uh Reddit is an addiction of mine and uh for some reason I can't shake it just can't get rid of it so I bought this so I wouldn't go on Reddit but then Australia shut down the 3G network so uh yeah that doesn't work anymore meanwhile yes here we go so after all of that waiting We've Ended up with this it's actually quite a long podcast
it's 31 minutes so if you click there you'll actually be able to hear the podcast between two people welcome back to the Deep dive today um we're diving into the world of organic photovoltaics okay specifically a type of solar cell that uses water interesting instead of toxic solvents during manufacturing that's that's a pretty significant detail a real hurle for the field there we are you can see it's natural it's actually really good sort of like Pace it sounds like a real conversation now this is the new upgrade that you should know about which is this
interactive mode beta beta let's go I like beta stuff okay so we've got two hosts um and this is where you can interject yourself into the conversation so here we can push play now you can see says welcome back to the Deep dive this is the actual podcast running then you click this button join are you ready let's join and it will invite me into the conversation X okay oh hey welcome what's up hey welcome what's up thanks very much for having me I actually just want to know what are the real world implications for
the production of solar cell hey there thanks for tuning in it's great to have you absolutely and that's a great question we were actually going to get to that later but we can you can't actually leave a little bit of a gap you need to know what you're talking about beforehand because the moment you leave a little bit of Silence it actually uh yeah just kind of uh gets on with it so here we'll click join again so push play Click join again ah yeah uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh okay then I actually just want to know
what are the real world implications for a successful um uh implic no what are the hang on a minute let me try again let's try this again what are the successful uh criteria for um like these solar panels how efficient do they really need to get okay okay so you're asking about the uh the success criteria for these solar panels like yes how efficient they need to be to actually be useful right yeah that's a key question it's not just about making them work but making them work well enough and that's not as simple but
according to the research one of the key performance metrics is called Power conver verion efficiency or pce right that's the percentage of sunlight that gets converted into all right so that is kind of like how you join in now here's the thing people are saying like oh it's like you're a third host for this podcast you're not really but I don't think that's really the case I think all you're really doing is using voice to text to generate a new kind of mini podcast so overall it's great that you're able to sort of like interrupt
push join they welcome you in you get to say something but the the thing is is that if you want to use this in some way you can actually download the podcast with you in it you can only click down here and you get the um audio overview which it generated initially not the one where you're interjecting so if you want to do that if you want to have you interject you need to actually sort of like record separately outside of this not a problem and not something that I think academics would really need to
use but that is a limitation if that's what you're expecting is to kind of you know produce a podcast and be that third person that's not really how it works at the moment but I think it is a really great way to just casually and conversationally sort of like navigate through all of these different types of resources and one way I think you would really like to use it is not just just with like loads of things but talking to an individual paper I think that's really cool so if we head here you can see
I've got one source I can click then you can see I've got one um Source here and I've put it up now I've generated a um an audio I haven't I can generate that conversation but ultimately once that conversation is generated I can then talk about that one topic specifically and I think it works really really well you could potentially do it by going back to here and unclicking these things but you then have to regenerate the audio and I don't think it's the best way to use that at the moment I think ultimately I
would just create a new notebook upload one paper that I wanted to talk about and then obviously generate that audio over and then I could sort of like interject and talk about that specific paper if there was something that I didn't quite understand about that paper really great if you're dealing with really technical things or if you're new to a research field and I think this is a powerful toour that is incredibly useful completely for free absolutely love it oh it's that tingle downstairs again oh it's nice and free all right the last thing that
you need to know about is notes and they're down here so you can see in this part we've get notes so you get a notebook and then in that notebook you can create notes super simple but the layout's not super intuitive down here you can create a study guide based on all of these you can create a briefing document these are just sort of like little tablets that you can click on or little tabs you can click on that ultimately just sort of like do a predefined thing with your data but if you do want
to add a note you can go in and you can actually just sort of like create your own and you can do that if there's something that particularly you want to record about all of this stuff really useful if you're just sort of like dealing with one research paper but here you can then click on this and you can say delete note and you can also add that note to a source so if you click here it will end up over on this side and then when you type in here and start chatting it will
actually talk with your note uh because if it's over here it doesn't chat with it I don't think so overall those are the updates I think it's really powerful the most important thing is this audio overview that you can interject and have a general convers ation now a genuine kind of like question and response interaction with anything you have on your computer be it presentations be it lecture notes be it reference lists be it overviews and literature reviews and all of these things that generally were really difficult to kind of like delve deep into now
you've got something and somewhere where you can ask questions and have a conversation with those papers and those resources and those sources it is just incredible go check it out if you like this video go check Che out this one where I talk about the AI upgrade that makes writing and academic writing an absolute Breeze go check it out
