BizTech Q&A 40: Why Would I Use NotebookLM if I have ChatGPT?

Answering your questions about business and technology

Question

Can you help me understand why I would use NotebookLM over something like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini?  I don’t want to make podcasts and I don’t see any other reason to consider it.
~ Anonymous

Answer

Hello,

One of the biggest reasons that we’ve seen people use NotebookLM (besides making podcasts) is precision.  Because NotebookLM is limited to the sources that you provide, its hallucination rate (making up information) is much lower than a general-purpose AI tool like ChatGPT. 

It also allows you to do deep dives on a set of information.  For example -

• • Sales team members can add everything that they have on a prospect as sources in a single notebook.  Then query that notebook to get new patterns, insights, etc.
  • Small businesses can create one notebook for each client that they have and have their own client cheat sheet to reference before each interaction
    • They can also use the chat function to make connections within the information that they didn’t see
  • Add information from each session of a large conference and get summaries or deeper dives
  • Put in business financial documents (publicly available) and get assessments of the business’ situation (i.e., cash flow, ability to sell, etc.)

I’ll give you one more - you are able to upload a lot more source data to NotebookLM than ChatGPT, etc.  The free version gives you 50 sources (500K words each) and the paid versions increase that number significantly.  

Thanks for the question and I hope that helps. 

If you want to know more about NotebookLM, check out our course where we cover all this and a lot more.

~ Damien