AI is all the rage lately. As a person of curiosity, I have found AI to be a very good assistant. It is not an ever reliable assistant, but it can do a lot of things human beings have difficulty to do. Google NotebookLM is such an example.
I recently read a very interesting book called The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. There is an interesting tidbit that Samuel Morse, the inventor of the famous Morse code, was actually born in Charlestown, a neighborhood of Boston. I decided to test how well Google NotebookLM can capture (or understand) its information.
After I imported the book, I asked it to pick up any significant connections to Boston. It did point out a few, but it did not pick the one on the birthplace of Morse.
Then it dawned on me that the book only mentions Charlestown, and NotebookLM does not know Charlestown is a neighborhood of Boston!
It also did not lean another important fact: Alexander G. Bell, the inventor of the telephone, conducted his first successful sound bite over the telephone in Boston, while being a professor at Boston University.
How do I let it learn all these?
Easy. I then imported a Wikipedia page of Samuel Morse, where it clearly stated Charlestown is part of Boston, and another Wiki page on Bell. Then I asked again:”Can you list signifiant people and events that are related in Boston?”
Here is the first half of the entire output:
“Significant People and Events in Boston
Here are some of the significant people and events related to Boston found in the sources:
●Alexander Graham Bell’s work with the deaf in Boston: Bell arrived in Boston in April 1871 to train instructors at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes in his father’s Visible Speech System.1 He went on to teach at the American Asylum for Deaf-mutes in Hartford, Connecticut and the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts.1
●Alexander Graham Bell’s professorship and research in Boston: In 1872, Bell became a professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory.2 He split his time between Boston and Brantford, Canada, where he spent his summers.2 While in Boston, he was heavily influenced by the scientific and inventive energy of the city and continued researching sound and speech transmission.2
●Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in Boston: Bell’s research in Boston culminated in the invention of the telephone.23 The first two-way telephone conversation happened in Boston on October 9, 1876, between Bell on Kilby Street and his assistant Thomas Watson in Cambridge, roughly 2.5 miles apart.
●Samuel F. B. Morse’s birth and early life: Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1791.
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I deem it a success. Google NotebookLM was able to digest all the information in a notebook and synthesize and output as a conversation. That was quite remarkable. Let’s hope this signifies the dawn of something greater.
One more thing. The most hyped feature of Google NotebookLM is its ability to make a two-person podcast – I tried it, and it is amazing. Here is a link to it:
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/e25e4843-6520-4063-8475-d146d101027a/audio