Google's auto-podcasting tool can now aggregate YouTube videos

YouTube offers a wealth of educational content and many of us use the platform to learn new things or get help with school work. Unfortunately, it doesn't have built-in features to help students take notes or get a quick summary of topics discussed in a video. While we don't expect YouTube to add such features, NotebookLM has a new feature that could be helpful.

NotebookLM is Google's AI-powered research and writing assistant that lets you quickly create notes, study guides, discussions with AI moderators, and more based on information from various sources. Previously, the tool allowed users to import information from PDF files, websites, Google Docs, Slides, and text/Markdown files. Now Google has added support for YouTube videos and audio files.

According to Google, NotebookLM can now summarize key concepts from public YouTube videos and “enable detailed exploration through inline quotes linked directly to the video’s transcripts.” The tool also lets you create AI-powered discussions based on the video and has a built-in YouTube player that allows you to watch the video and prepare notes at the same time.

With audio files, NotebookLM can create comprehensive study guides and help you find specific information in the audio transcript. Along with these new sources, Google has added a faster way to share audio summaries created in NotebookLM, which generates shareable URLs for the AI-hosted discussions.

You can try out these new features by going to the NotebookLM website and adding a URL of a public YouTube video or audio file to your notebook. Note that the shareable audio summary URLs are currently not available to Workspace users.