<aside>

Notable Features: Understanding the literature, evidence synthesis & analysis, in-depth notetaking, Modifiable podcast that you can “call in” to, Information grounded in your sources, ability to publicly share notebooks

</aside>

<aside>

Core Abilities: NotebookLM is an AI-powered thinking partner from Google that functions as a private workspace for your research materials. Its core ability is to be "source-grounded," meaning it only uses the documents you upload (PDFs, Google Docs, text files, websites, YouTube transcripts) to answer questions, generate ideas, and create summaries. For a literature review, this allows you to create a "notebook" for a specific topic, upload dozens of relevant papers, and then interact with your entire source library at once. You can ask it to compare methodologies across several papers, create a timeline of key findings, or generate a briefing document on a specific theme. All answers include inline citations that link directly to the relevant passages in your sources, making verification seamless.

</aside>

<aside>

Limitations/ Risks: The primary limitation of NotebookLM is its retrieval methods for information; when dealing with very large documents or a high number of sources, it may not "see" the entirety of the text at once, potentially leading to incomplete or inaccurate summaries if not carefully managed (model only looks at passages it deems most relevant vs accessing all content at once). While source-grounding greatly reduces hallucinations, users must still verify that the AI's synthesis is accurate and hasn't missed crucial nuance.

</aside>

<aside>

Platform/ Integrations: Web and mobile app. Allowable sources: text, PDFs, websites, google docs, google slides, youtube urls, or you can discover sources based on a query. Export audio files, images

</aside>

<aside>

Pricing: Access through Google Gemini subscription*.* Free: 100 notebooks with max 50 sources for each, 3 daily audio generations. Pro: 500 notebooks with max 300 sources each, 20 daily audio generations. (Sharing notebooks does not impact source limits)

</aside>

Tutorials/ Reviews

8 expert tips for getting started with NotebookLM

NotebookLM: A Breakthrough for Researchers, But Here's the Catch...

Screenshot