A New AI Tool Appears in the Wild

Google might have just created one of the best learning tools by accident

I woke up to yet another news of a new AI tool.

Nothing surprising. Tons are coming out each day. FutureTools lists 2,919 as of today. One more, one less, it often doesn’t matter. But this one blew my mind instantly. I felt its potential. And to top it all off, it’s free and has a slick UI—something that I love.

Say Hi to NotebookLM.

This new AI tool allows anybody to create a podcast based on the sources we feed it. These can be pretty much anything: PDF, audio files, YouTube videos, text we paste, or even entire web pages. Or a combination of all this!

Now, why does this blow my mind? Because it allows for the digestion of information in a much more convenient and fun manner.

Learn anything with ease

Say you’re learning about a topic in history. Let’s take the history of Taiwan. I can feed NotebookLM with this Wikipedia article, this overview from ThoughtCo, and the text from this Britannica article. I click “Generate” and the below conversation gets created in a few minutes.

Now, if I want to dig deeper into those sources, I can click on a suggested question or type my own question in the chat at the bottom. The answers I receive also include links to the sources, indicating which part of the text made the bot provide this or that response.

I can then either keep asking questions or “Save to note” so I can refer to it later. I can also click on some of the predefined buttons:

For History stuff, the Timeline is perfect as it lists the dates of what happened and the notable figures. The Study Guide gave me 10 short-answer questions, then the answers, then 5 essay questions, and finished with a glossary of key terms.

You can check the Notebook I created here to see what the other presets do.

NotebookLM can be extremely useful to learn pretty much anything:

• Want to dig into research about a topic you’ve never touched? You can get some structured and slightly dumbed-down data from this.

• Want to understand a topic you can’t wrap your head around? Feed a bunch of sources that explain it and listen to the podcast before asking your questions in the chat.

• Struggling to review a topic for an exam? Answer the questions you’ll get from the Study Guide.

These are just a few of the potential use cases for such a tool. And, you know me, of course I thought of language learning too.

Language learning galore

Let me start with the sad news first: this only creates an English podcast and will always reply in English too. No practicing a conversation in a target language here.¹

Want the good news now? Well, you can feed it sources in other languages.

Yes. This isn’t perfect and isn’t so immersion-like, but this makes it and incredible tool for low-intermediate to high-intermediate level learners. Basically, it can help you understand something that would have been way out of your league.

Let me give you an example of my very first test.

I bought a Graded Chinese Reader in 2013. I tried it back then but it was way out of my level. Still, it had audio files with it so I thought it’d be useful someday to read while listening. Despite the years, I still consider it complicated to read and understand. Stories and long and include vocabulary I don’t understand.

Got an idea of what I did?

Well, I fed the audio file to the NotebookLM and listened to a summary of the story in English so I’d know where the story was heading. It wasn’t perfect but it was short and helped me get started.

I followed up by asking the chat to provide a table with the difficult keywords from the story, their translation, and the sentence it appeared in. I had to “negotiate” a bit here and there to explain “difficult” and “keywords” so I’d get a useful table and finally got this.

I could then save it as a note and go back to it whenever I want.²

Now, onto another sad news: when checking the table in the note, it looks like crap currently. I reckon this will get fixed sooner than later but, in the meantime, I’m saving the answer in Obsidian as it uses Markdown and so does NotebookLM.

Now, I can use this tool to refer to my source whenever I struggle. And when I’m done with reading the story, I can request questions with the Study Guide and try answering in Chinese to practice my active skills.

That was ONE example.

Now imagine what else we can do with this:

• Add long news articles to have some knowledge of the topic before reading

• Fill in podcasts or YouTube videos in your target language and pull out grammar patterns and vocabulary, or get questions to practice your understanding or what you saw/heard.

• Open the source on the left, highlight some text and click “Help me understand” to get an explanation of it.

And so much more.

Final thoughts

This is just the beginning. This is as bad as it’ll ever get!

I’m looking forward to how this will evolve and all the use cases we’ll find with this. And there are other new tools that may help even further! For instance, I found PDF2Audio, a free tool that turns PDFs into podcasts and can even do it in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, and Mandarin. I haven’t succeeded in making it work yet but it’ll be a great supplement too.

I’ll keep experimenting with it and will provide as many possible ways to use it as possible in the next few weeks.

Let me know if you think of some others as well! I’d love to see if you’ve got others I haven’t thought of yet!

AI really can be an incredible tool.

People can say it’ll ruin language learning—and even learning as a whole—but tools like these ones really make me think they’ll only help us become better faster.

All we have to do is use them.

Cheers for reading,
Mathias

1. Although you can speak to it in other languages, it’ll still reply in English. Even if you specifically ask it to speak a different one.

2. Anything not saved as a note disappears so that’s a crucial step.