Love the context size and podcasts but never understood the UX. Why notes? Is there a difference between my notes and AI notes? Guess that's not my mental model of working with papers (Phd in psy) or I'm just spoiled by elicit.
Designing NotebookLM
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Re: Designing NotebookLM
#12NotebookLM has been one of the more useful projects I've used. Being able to focus a language processing model directly to the content you're looking for is really useful. I currently support a data application where the vendor's documentation for it is not particularly well organized. It's spread across dozens of PDFs, sometimes without particularly well reasoned organization. Dumping all those PDFs into NotebookLM…
Interesting about the TTRPG. I am a fan of 3D6 Down the Line, the (criminally Under-watched) Actual Play series..where they were doing Arden Vul, a massively intricate mega dungeon..I bet it could have been useful to the DM to look up info over plain search
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#13This post has the same issues as NotebookLM for me -- overdesigned, overengineered for what at its core is a simple and valuable UX. NotebookLM: obviously useful, but I just wanna select some files and chat w/ them or have them summarized for me. It's got low info density, way too many cards/buttons/sections/icons, and it makes the core UX really difficult for me to navigate. This post: I wanted to know what cool tho…
Came here to say this. Although the UI is clean, it's in no way a great user experience using NotebookLM. It's just such a great product so I go back to it, but the user interface is not my favorite part.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#14I'm curious from people who use it regularly. What do you use it for? Aside from audio overviews, what does it do better for you compared to vanilla chat interfaces or docs integration?
A friend uses it to create quizzes and flashcards when studying for uni
Any vanilla chat LLM can do this.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#15NotebookLM is extremely badly engineered: The large downloads don't work in mobile browsers. For the longest time, the downloads were in wav format which doesn't make any sense. The mobile app lacks much of the functionality too. The generated audio is often about an altogether different topic than the one I requested. And don't get me started about the quality of the speech -- it still has an occasional "third voice" problem that just doesn't fit in. Overall, I would say its UI fits the culture of shipping utter crap, and I would never hire any designer of that team.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend uses it to create quizzes and flashcards when studying for uni
Any vanilla chat LLM can do this.
The ui however has a 1 click button to do so, while it doesn't do that for aistudio and you need to do something more complex. I think he likes how the ui complements the llm, and I tried it these days and I agree
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#17This post has the same issues as NotebookLM for me -- overdesigned, overengineered for what at its core is a simple and valuable UX. NotebookLM: obviously useful, but I just wanna select some files and chat w/ them or have them summarized for me. It's got low info density, way too many cards/buttons/sections/icons, and it makes the core UX really difficult for me to navigate. This post: I wanted to know what cool tho…
I read this comment first and thought: "oh come on, how bad can it be". So then seeing this really being so bad(-ly overdesigned) was quite amusing.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#18I'm curious from people who use it regularly. What do you use it for? Aside from audio overviews, what does it do better for you compared to vanilla chat interfaces or docs integration?
I am a post sales consultant. Meaning I’m the first deeply technical person that a client talks to after they sign the contract that pre-sales has worked on.
Pre-sales has already had a couple of meetings by the time it gets to me. I put the transcripts of their calls and the contract (statement of work) into Notebook LLM to ask the high level questions like the objectives, the challenges, priorities, risks they have already surfaced etc.
That feeds into my first meeting slide deck so the client can expand upon, disagree with etc to make sure everyone is on the same page.
After my set of discovery sessions, I put those transcripts into the notebook too.
I can then use Notebook LLM to give me a first draft of the management style assessment report. I never expose LLM writing to the client. I have a certain style of writing and I hate AI slop.
Yes this is corporate approved, we use GSuite for everything. I like the fact that everything that NotebookLM outputs has curations from the source material.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#19I don't care much for NotebookLM's UX. I find the layout confusing, the concepts conveyed in the UI not very intuitive. I feel like the power of what's under the hood doesn't translate very well into the frontend. That said, this article was a very nice overview. Clean page, interesting to see his perspective. He clearly took tare and thought about the project. I don't agree with his conclusions and results, but that…
Do you use an alternative? I haven't explored the space much.
I don’t know that I’ve seen any product due quite the same thing yet. Like you said the space is pretty new and most of the other LLMs that I’ve seen tend to be about doing research. This seems to be the only one that’s really focused on just researching current documents you upload and giving you an interface to explore that. I don’t think you will take too long for new tools to come, but it’s too early.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#20This post has the same issues as NotebookLM for me -- overdesigned, overengineered for what at its core is a simple and valuable UX. NotebookLM: obviously useful, but I just wanna select some files and chat w/ them or have them summarized for me. It's got low info density, way too many cards/buttons/sections/icons, and it makes the core UX really difficult for me to navigate. This post: I wanted to know what cool tho…
Endless scrolling just to describe a three-panel layout, something that's been around since the 80s (?).