I'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 like the mindmap tool
Designing NotebookLM
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Re: Designing NotebookLM
#22This 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…
Fully concur with sibling comments. Maybe I set the wrong expectation for myself: that it would be a blog post with a narrative to bring the reader through some plot points and a resolution. Instead it is a bunch of schematic ideas presented without connection or progression, like a conceptual summary sketched from an interesting lecture that can be read between the lines.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#23I stopped using NotebookLM after one use. Not sure what’s the fuss aside from the podcast generation gimmick
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#24Love 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.
I'm an autism researcher. I also don't get the "notes" thing. Am I supposed to use it as my note taking app (e.g. like I use OneNote?).
Sometimes interactive discussion with the LLM about a paper can speed learning. I've used audio overviews for the drive to the lab, but I haven't been able to get the overview to go *hard* into the science.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#25i think the main star of notebooklm is the audio model and the ux gets in the way of that
and if you're not very clear about what drove notebooklm's success you might be at risk of cargo culting ALL of their process instead of just focusing on the thing that worked.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#26Love 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.
Notes help when sharing the notebook with others. By sharing snippets with others, they immediately have conversation starters that they can use to dive deeper into the material.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#27I stopped using NotebookLM after one use. Not sure what’s the fuss aside from the podcast generation gimmick
When working with documents, the citations that NotebookLM provide increase the confidence in answers. This allows to use NotebookLM for team-level knowledge bases.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#28Any reason why when I upload a set of books to NotebookLM and have an interesting conversation about them with NotebookLM, the conversation is not stored? I can't revisit it later, I can't continue from there. I don't understand why they changed the UX/UI from the other AI solutions (Gemini or GPT).
I also don't get why NotebookLM refuses to write things either, I can't make it write an essay based on the information I fed through PDFs or other files.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#29As a non-user who just played with the podcast thing a while back, is notebooklm actually better than just using something like Claude Projects to dump all your files into it, and then chatting with it in that project?
Other than the podcast thing of course which is unique.
Mostly curious about perspectives of folks who used both and can compare them.
Re: Designing NotebookLM
#30I use NotebookLM everyday. The simplicity of the design is much appreciated. However, there are real issues scaling the design and keeping it user friendly as the team keeps adding new features.
The most recent example of this is with the addition of 2 new capabilities (Flashcards and Quiz), "Artifacts Button Container" now has 6 large buttons, and is 328px in height! There are users who are accessing the site from small screen devices in India and they have been asking for help on Discord forums because they cannot see their notes anymore. So I had to create a Tampermonkey script to let users collapse it.[0] I heard the team is fixing that soon, but they should have done more testing before releasing it.
There are other issues like this that I've fixed with scripts. The strangest one is the "notes." Why force the users read a 2000 word essay in a 360px sidebar? So I wrote a script I wrote to let you pop it into full screen mode.[1]
Another example is the chat input field. The follow up questions are hardly usable at all. And they're not stable after you select them.
I can go on all day, but I think it's better to fix things than to complain.
[0] https://gist.github.com/volkanunsal/94db50629cad816eca84c836...
[1] https://gist.github.com/volkanunsal/fded9124d62422c0d2672b8a...