How to Prompt NotebookLM's Interests One thing we hear constantly from users first experiencing Audio Overviews is how good the hosts are at uncovering the interesting bits from their sources. You can elicit that same interest-driven summarization in text chat too. Here's how: The Gemini models are amazingly deft at exploring large bodies of text and imagery to find specific sections that are high in surprise, high in unexpected information. You can call that just another incremental improvement on search and summarization if you want—to me it seems like a bigger deal than that—but either way, it lets you get answers to questions that no computer in the world could have produced just a year ago. When I'm trying to get my bearings with a few new documents that I think I need to understand, I'll load them into Notebook and ask a variation on: What are the most surprising or interesting pieces of information or narratives in these sources? And I'll maybe give it a gentle steer: Please focus on the NASA astronauts of the 1960s, not the later ones. And I'll tell it to include key quotes. In 30 seconds or less I'll have an enormously useful text document highlighting the most interesting and compelling passages in my sources. You can get most of this in NotebookLM right now, just by choosing to convert your sources into a Briefing Doc in the Notebook Guide panel. (And obviously, if you want to listen to this information in conversation form, Audio Overviews has you covered.) Both Briefing Doc and Audio Overviews are designed explicitly to surface interesting material. But you can get more clever and more personalized with it just by tweaking your prompts slightly. Here's one one example. I uploaded something like 500K words of transcripts from the NASA oral history project, covering the entire span of NASA from Gemini (the other one) to Apollo and all the way to the Space Shuttle. And then I asked NotebookLM: I'm interested in writing something about the Apollo 1 fire. What are the most surprising facts or ideas related to the fire discussed in these transcripts. Include key quotes. Take a look at the answer that NotebookLM generated in 20 seconds or so. How long would it have taken me to assemble this document manually, sifting through effectively five books worth of transcripts? 10 hours? You can't command-F for "interesting things."