Google’s NotebookLM Launches New Features for AI Podcasts
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Today on the podcast, we have some big news out of Google. And this is actually a very interesting story. Google has been criticized and praised for a lot of different things in the AI space, specifically with their AI models worrying that they're not catching up fast enough. Now it seems like they have a bit of a turnaround. But one of their breakaway products that I think has really helped put Google on the map, oddly enough, is WordPress.

Notebook LM. This is kind of one of the first big viral products to come out of Google. And it's interesting because I feel like Google has come up with a ton of different things. They've thrown a lot of things against the wall and it's really hard to know what sticks. And it just so happens that Notebook LM is one of these products that sticks because essentially

It allows you to upload documents and it will turn them into a podcast with a male and a female commentator like talking back and forth about it. This is a really interesting topic and a really interesting tool because people are like, hey, instead of reading this 27, you know, page prospectus on X, Y, and Z, I can just throw it in here and I just like listen to a podcast. And for me personally, like on my...

45-minute drive to work today, I listen to a podcast the whole way. That's just what I like to do. I like to hear a conversation about things. So this is something that it's a medium of consuming information that people really appreciate. And this is a really interesting tool that's able to do this using all of their new generative AI tools. So

They've just added a bunch of new features today to Notebook LM that is very interesting. I want to break down everything going on with that. But before I do, I wanted to say if you're interested in using a tool like this to create a podcast or make money in any other way online, I would love for you to join the AI Hustle School community. This is a community of over 150 people.

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As far as what Google is doing, this is really interesting. This update is coming out today. And essentially, they have a new feature that allows you to guide the AI-generated audio conversations, aka the podcasts that Notebook LM is creating. And what this means is when you first open up the thing... So this is a problem. And I've used this tool before, Notebook LM. I've talked about this before. The problem is sometimes you throw a document in there and...

Like you want to know information on part of the document, but part of it's just like useless. And so it doesn't really know and it covers everything in the whole document, even the stuff that you feel like is less relevant. So the cool new thing with the guide is there's a pop up that will come up and it essentially says, yeah,

It lets you customize this. So you can customize it. You can tell it what topics you want it to specifically cover and how this actually works. If you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, I'll share my screen and show you some interesting stuff. But otherwise, I'll just explain. There's a pop-up that comes up that says audio overview, deep dive conversation, two hosts. So it lets you...

Click that. You click generate if you want to just go in like normal or you can click customize. Now, if you click customize, it's going to let you essentially put a prompt in like chat GPT or anything else where you can say, look, I want it to specifically cover X, Y, and Z topics. Don't talk about X, Y, and Z topics in the document. Focus on this and that. To me, this is really interesting. And I actually love this because, um,

Okay, I'll give you just a strange example. I haven't used this, but I could imagine this being useful for me. I have a number of podcasts I don't really talk about a lot that essentially are, they repost clips of my main podcast. So these podcasts are out there and

you know, with this customization feature and I've seen other people talking about the fact that notebook LM is going to allow you to essentially do your own voice. Sometimes I've thought like, oh, for these like clip ones. Well, anyways, I think it'd be cool to start a podcast where maybe I do shorter episodes, two or three minutes and I cover like everything.

every little bit of AI news that happens every day. Right now, when it's just me sitting here in a studio, obviously there's a big production setup and I try to cover just like the biggest, most critical piece of AI news for the day. And I do a little bit more of a deep dive, like 10, 20 minute take on something. Okay. So I've thought oftentimes like TechCrunch has started to do this thing where they have these like TechCrunch, I think they're called in brief or something, but it's just like a paragraph about a news story. So it's like, I think came out, we're going to give you a paragraph about it.

That's what you need. And there's not a lot to the story, but it's an interesting thing that we want to share this piece of news. Okay. Anyways, so I thought it'd be cool to do a podcast similar to that. I don't know if I have time 10 times a day to hop on and record a two minute thing. So I was like, oh, if I clone my voice, maybe we could have a voice clone, do something like that. So, you know, it'll appeal to some people. Obviously not everyone. I make a big investment in you're hearing my actual voice in an actual studio that I paid actual money for. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand that whole argument. In any case,

The problem with these two-minute clips is a lot of times what I'll do is grab like two or three articles from a few different news organizations covering the same story, smash them all together, or get Chad Shapit or someone else to smash them all together and cover some key highlights. And theoretically, I'd feed this into something like Notebook LM. The problem being is sometimes these news organizations cover elements of a story that are completely non-relevant to me. So for example, a lot of stories on AI, they'll talk about, you know, like...

This is an incredibly dangerous AI because it can do X, Y, and Z, and there's an existential risk to humanity. And like I talk about the risks of AI. This is not my big focus. I'm very optimistic about technology and where technology is going. I'm not an alarmist. I'm not a big regulator guy. Like, right, there's just some things that like are fundamental to me and everyone's different, whatever. I don't care. So when I throw those all together, though, if this notebook LM was like reading through all this article and all the different points and whatever that I vetted,

And it was coming up and it was talking about things that I didn't necessarily agree with in my own voice that, you know, obviously that's not authentic. So I would love to be able to essentially do that same workflow, except I say, hey, anytime that there's a point that comes up and it's talking negatively about technology or where this advancement might go or X, Y, and Z, switch it.

to, you know, be a little bit more optimistic, still cover some of the risks, but like, don't, don't be like a big downer. And I hate to like, even have to say that, but there are just some news organizations that are a really big downer, not all some. Okay. So that would be an incredibly useful use case. And another one is just like, you would have a document where you're interested in half of it and not the other half. So there's a lot of use cases. I'm giving you one specifically for me. Let's talk a little bit about what they actually have said about this. So

They said, quote, the whole team has been dedicated to listening to and analyzing all of the feedback we've gotten. And the number one feature that emerges that people want was just to give the AI a little nudge. So that's essentially why they came out with this. They also emphasized, well, in giving that quote, that customizing audio summaries doesn't mean user instructions would be used to train the AI model. So that's what TechCrunch said. But essentially what they're saying is like,

Everyone's always concerned about like their data and what happens to their data. So they're just saying, look, like if you're giving it a prompt or not taking your prompt and training our model for that in general, I think they don't actually use your, you know, your data to train anything unless you give them permission and stuff. And there I was asking for feedback. So I think this is very interesting.

However, there is something else that they've launched. So along with this sort of customization option, they're also going to let you as a user get essentially the ability to listen to this podcast.

Audio overview so it's like talking and while it's talking you're able to continue working with notebook LM and you're able to ask it questions, right? So like essentially like chat GPT you're able to be like, you know, it's talking I was like Oh and this and that happened and you're like, hey like tell me a little bit more about this thing and then it just it plays it into the podcast it's like can you imagine if you're listening to a podcast of two people that you admire I think are interesting and while they're talking you're like

you know, dropping comments. Actually, I guess this is kind of realistic with like some live streams or like Twitch or like YouTube even where you can drop comments and people are like looking at some of the top comments and responding to them live. So that's kind of what it's doing, which is like super fascinating.

Um, and you can ask it for like citations specifically. So if it says something and you're like, wait a second, like that doesn't sound, I don't know that that doesn't sound like what I would imagine. You're like, Hey, can you like tell me exactly where in the document it says that? And then it will pull it up. So you can also ask for specific quotes and all sorts of things. So this is both of those are incredible features that are making this so much more useful. This was all launched back at Google's IO developer conference last year. Um,

And it just dropped, I think, in December to essentially be accessible. And it's going to be rolling out to a bunch of new markets, including India and UK, obviously two huge markets. So you can expect the uptick in this and more than 200 companies in June. So...

What I wanted to talk about is what traction this has already had. Google says that over 80,000 organizations are currently using this, which I think is quite impressive. And because of this, I think they're really trying to essentially make some money off of this. They're starting a new notebook LM business tier, essentially. So businesses can apply for this, what they're calling it a pilot. So it's not like a

a full launch, but this is their pilot. And if you apply for it, if you get accepted, Google's going to give them early access to a bunch of different product features, training, and email support. Now, product features, cool. Training, meh. You can probably just figure this out from a couple YouTube videos. Email support, people love it, but like,

whatever that's, you can figure it out. If it can do it, it can do it. If not, it can't. So in any case, I don't see like a huge change with this business program. They said, we also want businesses to tell us here are the features we want to deploy. So to me, that's interesting. If you do get the email support and you're like, Hey, can you please change this? I do see some value to that. Otherwise, I don't know. So all of the specifics of this is going to be announced later. They haven't really rolled out the timeline, the pricing tiers and everything else is going to go into it. In any case,

Currently, Notebook LM has 4.1 million monthly visitors. This is according to SimilarWeb. And that's 25 or 2.5 million of that is coming from desktop. 1.6 million is coming from phones. And so this is a really popular tool. Honestly, this is like one of those big viral breakouts that if this was a startup, it'd be crushing it. But because it's Google...

hopefully they stick around. Hopefully, you know, 4 million users is enough for them to think it's a viable product and not to just nuke it. I think at this point they just want any traction they can get in the AI space specifically with their AI tools. So like, look, we made Gemini, this thing leverages Gemini. It's getting a lot of traction. Let's let this like use case push to essentially grow the core product. So I think this is safe for now, uh, from, you know, not being tweeted on the killed by Google, um, X account. Uh,

I hope it sticks around. This is a really cool tool. I'm going to experiment with this. I'll do some fun things and I'll let you guys know how that goes. But last month, they also added YouTube videos and audio files that you can upload to get these summaries. So you can also use your Google Drive. You could throw in URLs, PDFs, text, right? This is kind of cool. You can throw in like the URL of a website. Maybe it's a huge...

website about something interesting. You can actually copy and paste it. You just throw in the URL and it's going to do the whole same thing. So overall, I think this is a very interesting tool. I love this new ability to customize the prompt and to kind of guide it while you're talking to it. I think Google has seen some traction with this and they're going to put some investment, they're going to put some money and some time into this. So I'm excited to see where that goes and what we're able to do with this in the future. If you enjoyed the episode today, you

Make sure to leave a review. And again, if you're interested in making money online, join the AI Hustle School community. Would love to help you grow and scale your business with AI tools. It's something I'm doing every single day. So I'm in the game and I have all sorts of great tools and tips and software that I use. I'd love to share with you. Anyways, thanks so much for tuning in and hope you have an amazing rest of your day.