Full transcript of “How to use NotebookLM with Apple Notes”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Hey everyone, I hope you're doing well. I thought today I'd do a video about more AI integration with Apple Notes. And this will be our first foray into the Google world of Google's Notebook LM. And if you haven't used Google's Notebook LM, you should really take a look at it because it is an amazing tool, but I'm not going to go in deep into Notebook LM and how it works. I'm just going to give you an overview of how you can integrate Apple Notes back and forth. If you want to learn more about Notebook LM, there's plenty of videos out there on what it is. And its name stands for notebook language model, which Google developed that allows you to provide a number of sources and documentation that will then generate all kinds of output for you. Be it a presentations or mind maps or notes or even audio files, things like that. It gives you all kinds of interesting ways
0:46 for you to actually learn, but also create output. And if you don't know anything about it, I strongly suggest that you go out to YouTube and look at some tutorial videos on the basics of providing sources, creating output, creating audio files, all of those things, and just get a sense of the interaction. Once you have that, jump on back to this video, and then we can talk a little bit more about the Apple integration. But if you know about it, let's let's continue. So, the main three steps I want to cover today are first just getting your Apple notes into LM, then using LM with your notes. just generally I'm not going to give you a full tutorial there. And then ways to get the LM output back into notes and those are some of the various forms of output that LM can create. Okay, so what you see here are my Apple Notes and
1:32 notebook LM both up on my screen at the same time. And I have my notes from the previous video I did on how to write an essay with Apple Notes. And we're going to use those notes to help build out a notebook LM environment. So, one of the first things you do when you create a new notebook in Notebook LM is you can basically provide a source. So, I'm just going to pick a Wikipedia article on this and we're going to use that as our first source. Right now, that's in the source list and that'll help get the sources set up. But, I'm going to change this to my local group project and we're all set. And the next thing to do is to start pulling your notes into the project. Now, the nice thing about this is you don't have to use all the
2:19 sources at the same time. You can add sources, delete sources, you can change them. But let's let's start here. So, quickly, I've expanded the notebook. And now you can see how it defaults with some of the information that I pulled in from the web. And then some of these studio functions that you have available to you. So, you can create audio overviews, video overviews, mind maps, reports flashcards quizzes infographics, slide decks, and data tables. And this is the way you work with it. Again, I I don't want to go to a full tutorial, but we're just going to start there so you get a good view overview of how LM is laid out. All right, let's get to adding sources. The first thing you'll see in Notebook LM is this add sources prompt. And one thing to know about Notebook LM, there's no automated pipeline here. So, we can't automate pipeline of Apple Notes into
3:04 Notebook LM. You could probably write scripts under the hood to do all that extra work, but it's not that hard to do this manually. Now, you can see here a few things I can do. I can I can pick web articles to add. I can upload files. I can add things from Google Drive. And I can just copy text. So, and actually I can enter data directly into the interface. All right, let's just do that. Let's just copy that information directly into the source interface. So, I'll add a source and we'll just do copy text. Click here. I will highlight my note, everything in it. And then go back here and we can just drag that in. And we have a source. Insert. Done. Now I've pasted that in. I could do that individually for each note. Now obviously that's going to take a lot of time. You're not going to want to do it that way, but we'll talk a
3:49 little bit more about that. The other way you can add sources is I exported these notes both as PDF and markdown. And then you can just go to upload files. And you can see here I have the same introduction as PDF. I could add that or I can come back to sources and upload the markdown version of this. Same idea. It would be the same information. And obviously you would pick one of those three options to get your data in. But obviously that's very manual and you're going to want to do something that's a little more automated. And if you haven't seen my previous video on how to merge Apple Notes, take a look at that because what we're going to do here is take a group of notes first merge them together in Apple Notes using a shortcut into a single note and then bring that into Notebook LM. Okay. And just to show on
4:36 iOS, you can do the exact same thing. You just need to load the app onto your phone and then the same idea, you can just open a note. You can basically select the whole thing. Uh you could just copy that and then you can jump over to notebook LM and simply just paste the text here and add it in as another source. So same idea, the app works the same way both on iOS and on Mac OS. Now, one additional thing you can do with iOS is you can use Google Docs and you can drag and drop Apple Notes right into a Google Doc. So, all you have to do is just highlight the note that you want to select and then you drag it over to Google Docs, drop it in and you have a full document right there and Notebook LM can import Google
5:21 Docs directly. So, that's another another way you could do it if if you're using an iPad or an iPhone for this kind of activity. Okay, that's going to take a lot of time to move notes one by one into LM. So, the best thing you're going to want to do here is use this technique I had in my previous video on merging the notes together. And to merge these, you need the shortcut that I provided. And I'm going to provide the shortcut in the description below again for you. It's a little more advanced than my last one, but at least lets you do this and combine them together. So, if we jump to shortcuts, we see here what it's going to do is it allows me to select the notes from a folder. it'll combine them all together with a tag. So, let's just run it. And I'm going to call this the local group research
6:08 notes. And then same output folder that my notes in. And then I'm going to pick those six notes that I had that were separate. So, there were six of them here. I picked the six. It's going to ask me for what uh tag I'd like to add to that. So, I'll add astronomy to that and it should be done. And if I come over to my note folder, you can see here it has the six notes combined together, all merged together. So now this is a lot easier way to get that data into notebook LM. So I can do one of three things again. I could just copy paste this in or better yet maybe just create a PDF of this set of notes because I may have a large set of them or a markdown
6:55 file of those notes because maybe I want to combine files of things I pulled from other sources outside of Apple notes. And this is going to be the best and easiest way to get that information in. But let's just do it. We'll just do add source. I'll just do the same thing again. We'll pick the whole thing. We'll do the copy text. Paste here. Drag it. Whoops. Drag it right on over. And there we go. We have the whole thing in. Now, as it adds it, you'll see here, pasted text. And let's expand this now and take a look. So, as I expand this out, as I open it up, it's going to give me all this information about that set of notes I just added. And now I can do research on these notes. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. But now you get the idea. Now I have that data in Notebook LM from Apple Notes. So again,
7:42 use that merge notes technique. and then you can just combine large documents into it. All right, let's just take a quick look at the interface for Notebook LM. Again, I I said I'm not going to go into a deep uh overview of this. There's plenty of videos out there you can you can dive deeper into how this works, but basically the idea is this. On the left you have your sources. In the middle you have your chat and on the right you have your outputs. So your sources are specific. It can be PDFs, documents, like I said, Google Drive notes there, Apple notes we put in there. You can highlight, select which notes you want to use and interact with just those. And if I click on them, we get information about the notes that the notebook AI has been scanning. I could look at the Wikipedia article
8:27 here. Same thing. It just gives me information. You get the idea. You can keep adding sources. There's obviously an upper limit on that. Then in the middle is where you can interact with that. You can ask questions. So, it even prompts you with some questions ahead of time. So, I could just click on that and then it's going to look at all the sources and try to drive an answer to that question. Of course, you could put in your own questions and answers. And then on the right here is the generation of outputs. So, you can see uh I've already I'm creating all the types here. You have the audio, video, mind map, reports, flashcards, quiz, etc., etc. So for example, we take a look here at a view of a infographic. Very nice. Just generated that for me. Uh you have a quiz here which you can open up and then and basically work
9:14 yourself through a quiz question and answer quiz. You have flashc cards. So same thing like just like the quiz and right now it's generating a slide deck, a video overview, an audio overview and then the mind map which I find very useful which you can expand specific concepts out of all of those sources or just one if you want to select just one of them and do reviews this way. So and it's a fantastic tool to use for any kind of research you're doing. All right, I've changed to my Mac speakers here and we're going to listen to the audio output from these notes. And what's really interesting is my interaction with this. >> Welcome everyone. Come on in. Uh get comfortable. >> It is a really great topic we have lined up. >> It really is. If you've ever, you know, looked up at the night sky and felt that sudden that dizzying sense of scale,
10:01 that feeling where the sheer vastness of the universe completely overwhelms. >> Oh, hey there. What's up? >> Hey, I'd like you guys to give me an overview of the topics you're going to talk about specifically. >> That is a wonderful request. >> Yeah, that helps us out, too. We can absolutely frame this for you. >> Okay, let's unpack this. >> So, today we are doing a deep dive into the local group. >> That's our immediate cosmic neighborhood, the home of the Milky Way. >> We're going to start by looking at the physical structure, >> specifically how it's shaped like a cosmic dumbbell. >> And we will detail its size, which is immense. >> We'll talk about the >> All right, you get the idea. I'll jump back here in a minute, but that's a pretty interesting way to interact with your notes, I got to say. >> All right, you get the idea on how that would work. O obviously other AI tools
10:46 can do these kinds of things of interaction and generating output but the nice thing about notebook LM is it's all in one environment and it's a great way to do research. Um one thing I want to call out here is also the generation of notes. So as you're interacting in the chat section in the middle here you can save your outputs as notes. Saved a note you'll see here and these notes appear in the list on the side. You can export each one of these one by one if you want to. Um, just copy paste or whatever. But there's another trick here. If you've exported a bunch of notes, I'm sorry. If you have actually output a bunch of notes, you can convert them all to a source and it combines them all together into a source. Now, this is just the notes, not the other types. And then all your notes are here. And then once you have that, you can
11:33 simply just copy and paste this. So this is automatically way it groups it together for you without you having to do it one by one and that makes it much easier and it's easy. You just select all the information in this combined source guide for those combined notes and then just paste it back in your notes. Unfortunately, Google doesn't have a good way to interact with Apple notes. So you basically have to copy and paste this back in. For the other types of output like audio files and infographics and those things, you can simply just export those directly and then just import the file through either iCloud sharing and or photo sharing. All right, that wraps up a basic overview of it. But I do have some final thoughts. First is just verification of your
12:18 source data. As you add each source from your Apple Notes, make sure that notebook LM is scanning through all the text properly. What you can do is you can ask questions about an individual source and have it answered to make sure it has outlined and understands everything in that source. Second is there's a limitation on the app on iOS. So an iPad and an and an iPhone you don't get all the output options. Just keep that in mind as you do in Mac OS. Third, the export obviously to Apple notes is going to have some issues uh just depending because you can't drag and drop or you can't use QuickNotes in certain instances. You may have to just put it in your photo library. You may have to put it in a shared iCloud download file and or even just capture
13:05 the audio with a with a sound recorder and and save the audio in your notes that way. And lastly, you need a Google account and I know some of you may not want to do that. So, that's going to limit what you can do. Well, that's it. I hope you found that informative. Notebook LM is a great learning and research environment. So, I hope that helps you in some way. Again, thank you for all the subscribers. I really appreciate it. This is our first again kind of transition over to the Google environment. I'm going to be doing more videos on Google and Google technology. So, we'll be talking about that soon. Again, take care everyone. Please subscribe. Have a great day.
