NotebookLM

When learning something new, I load reliable material first, then keep asking questions around it. Much faster than searching aimlessly. It's clearly weaker with video than documents.

I imported course videos for notes. The result wasn't detailed enough and timestamps didn't line up. Worst, it basically ignores derivation steps shown on screen, so the blackboard parts went unrecorded.

It saved me during finals: I stuffed in all the lecture slides and asked anything. For my thesis it hurt: material in notebook A is invisible in notebook B, so cross-topic research means switching back and forth.

I uploaded forty-nine papers, six to ten pages each, and found some content was never read in at all; the methods sections were simply blank. As you get close to fifty sources, it starts dropping things.

Audio Overviews are the feature I use most. Drop in a few documents and you get a listenable explainer; you can adjust the length and set what to focus on. Perfect for the commute.

I opened the deck it generated and every page was just images. I couldn't change a single word in PowerPoint, and ended up redoing the layout myself.