Transcript of How I Use NotebookLM With Obsidian 📝 Practical Note-Taking + AI 🤖

really adds a conversational element to My Vault I can go through and selectively choose which notes I want to have a conversation with drop them into the source section here and then fill out the gaps that I'm trying to add into my own notet taking with things like YouTube videos voice notes and articles from the internet hi my name is Callum also known as wander loots and welcome to today's video on AI and obsidian using notebook LM to augment your note taking in obsidian this video is part of a series I'm doing on AI and obsidian where I'm using different AI tools that integrate with obsidian to augment my note taking to augment my second brain or my personal knowledge management system in this video I'm going to walk through how I use notebook LM alongside obsidian to boost my research my writing and my learning as I take notes in obsidian for many people AI is daunting to use and can feel overwhelming that's why before I get into more integrated obsidian plugins that use AI I wanted to show you how I use notebook LM with my personal notes from obsidian in since there's no installation or extra steps required notebook LM is one of the easiest AI tools I've come across in the last 3 years and the one that I use almost more than anything else it makes it incredibly easy for you to upload your own sources like PDFs markdown files from obsidian YouTube videos websites and then have a conversation with those sources it allows you to surface insights generate automated reports and summaries and even can produce an AI podcast where two AIS have a conversation back and forth with one another using the notes and sources that you put into notebook LM the best part using notebook LM is both free and private privacy is a key element of why I use obsidian in the first place so for me any AI tool that I'm using that I'm reviewing and looking at integrating with my not taking system has to also maintain that privacy now you might be wondering notebook LM is on the Internet it's a web UI it's a web interface that you have to upload files to so how is this integrating with obsidian well the key here is that notebook LM accepts markdown files which which is the main way that obsidian operates it's how obsidian saves all of their files one of the main reasons I've been building my personal Knowledge Management System or second brain in obsidian is because it lets you future proof your note taking it creates markdown files which can be interpreted by any other software in the future notebook LM is no exception making it incredibly easy to add markdown notes from obsidian which I'll get more into in a minute now markdown notes are just one reason that I use obsidian if you're interested in learning more about the different reasons why I use it I actually made a video here that talks about all of my favorite features and why I got into using obsidian in the first place so I recommend checking that video out next today's video is going to be more of a practical overview of how I actually use notebook LM and obsidian to boost my research writing and general expression if you're interested in learning more about the specific features in Notebook LM and how they can be tweaked and modified and expanded for your own use case I recommend checking out this video here which is my notebook LM overview it's actually my most popular video so far and Google themselves found found it helpful so that's pretty cool if you find this video helpful I would love if you would please consider liking and subscribing as your support is what enables me to continue making these videos so I appreciate it a lot now let's dive into using notebook LM and obsidian okay so now that you have a bit of a better idea on why I'm interested in integrating notebook LM and obsidian I thought I'd show you some practical use cases that I've been building out over the last few months but first before I do that I just want to quickly show you the privacy policy because one of the key goals of how I want to use artificial intelligence with obsidian is that the data that I'm providing the AI is not used in training the AI model I want to keep my data private I want to keep it personal and I want to be able to have control over the data that I'm generating and how I'm choosing to integrate it with AI so if you see here if you go to the notebook LM privacy policy you can see that it says we value your privacy and never use your personal data to train notebook LM so that's why I'm preferring to use notebook LM with obsidian because if I were to drop information into chat GPT or into Cloud depending on the settings you have toggled you may be sending that data to the Cloud Server that the AI model is running off of and that data might be taken and used to train their model but by default The Notebook LM status is that they do not use your personal data to train the notebook LM model but you can see here that if you choose to provide feedback it's possible that a human reviewer may see this so this is where you have to be really careful what type of information you're uploading because for example if you're dealing with intellectual property or a patentable idea it's possible that this might shoot yourself in the foot down the road because it's possible that a human reviewer might be able to see the patentable idea so I actually have a whole video that goes more in depth on what this means and how it relates to intellectual property so I recommend checking out that video if you're interested and just one quick note as well if you're a Google workspace or Google workspace for Education user your uploads queries and model responses are not reviewed by human reviewers and not use to train the AI models so if you're using workspace or workspace for Education you don't have to worry about the Privacy at all because notebook LM is not going to take your data and no one else is going to see it and if you want to go for the paid version of notebook LM plus which I talk about more in my notebook LM update video I believe that your information is also kept private because you're using the paid version as well so that's just something to consider when you're using an AI tool that you want to be sure you know what's happening with your data what's happening when you upload something so I always like to check the Privacy terms and conditions before I start using it and honestly I've been pretty happy with the way that notebook LM by Google has outlined their privacy policy making it very clear that my information is not going to be used for training purposes so I feel a lot more comfortable using this with my obsidian notes okay so just as a super quick overview I'm going to show you how you can create a new notebook here so you can just press new and you can see as soon as you do so it prompts you to add sources so you can add sources from a bunch of different areas and a bunch of different formats so you can see here that that the type of supported files are PDF txt markdown and audio and you can connect your Google drive through Google Docs or Google Slides you can add website links or YouTube videos and you can just copy and paste text because obsidian operates on markdown files this makes notebook LM a really nice complement for augmenting your personal Knowledge Management System that you're building in obsidian because you can just literally drag and drop files from obsidian from your finder or from your desktop and you can just add the markdown file right here begin asking questions with your notes similarly if you want to you could export your notes to PDF which I'll explain a little bit more how you can do that how you can merge a bunch of different files from obsidian into one PDF to make it easier to ask questions with notebook LM so I'll explain how to do that in a few minutes okay so then if you had a source you'll see it appear on the side here you get a chat window where you can just have a chat interface as you would commonly see with something like chat GPT or perplexity and then on the right hand side here you have the studio which allows for the generation of an audio overview which is actually an AI generated podcast where Two Hosts have a conversation about your Source material and your chat conversation so that's a cool feature that again I'll explain in a few more minutes but I do also have a dedicated video that goes more in depth on how I like to use this feature and then below that you'll have a note section so this is where you can generate automatic notes or you can create notes from the chat history here to save them over time because your chats are not saved by default in Notebook and again I talk about all this more in my how to use notebook LM video how to take your note taking to the next level so I just wanted to keep that intro as brief as possible because today I want to show you more practical use cases of how I actually integrate notebook LM with obsidian so let's get into the use cases okay so I'm going to show you a few of my favorite ways that I've been using notebook LM with obsidian my practical use cases that I find help me on a day-to-day basis I use notebook LM almost every day and you can see here that it's sorted by the most recently used not books that I've been using for quite a while I've been slowly building them out with different sources to improve the quality and generally just augment my personal Knowledge Management System in as many ways as possible so the first use case I'm going to show you is the research and execution of ideas to expand on an idea or a project or a plan by bringing in specialized documents in other words using notebook LM as a research tool alongside my obsidian notes to really increase the speed and understanding that I have when I'm learning complex topics so one of the more complicated systems that I've tried to figure out over the last couple years is the zle Casten system the zcast and system is a note taking Model A system that was developed by Nicholas Lumen and it's one of the most productive note taking systems of all time and I'm not going to get too into depth exactly what this is because I also have another video that goes much more in depth on what zettle Casten is and how it works but the gist is that you're able to take sources you're able to take information and resources and extract the key insights that you learn from these resources the concepts and you're able to keep those external sources separate from your internal ideas in two different streams so that you can always tell what was your idea and what was someone else's idea so to build out this molecular zle Casten system which is my customized version of how I like to use zle Casten I have dropped in a whole bunch of my newsletters you can see all these numbered documents on the side here but I've also brought in a bunch of YouTube videos I brought in my booknotes on building a second brain I brought in my booknotes on how to take smart notes I brought in markdown files from obsidian I brought in my own YouTube videos that I've made and other articles from around the internet and down at the bottom here I also have a voice note that I was having a conversation with my fiance Taylor about how to build out this system and how I could fit it into what I'm trying to do with my content creation and building my business generally so we had about an hour and a half long conversation and I was able to drop that whole conversation into notebook LM and it just transcribed it so now that I have all of these sources in here I can go to the chat and I can just start asking questions about it okay so for example I'm going to ask it to please summarize as briefly as possible the zle Casten system for a new note taker so you can see here that it talks about the fleeting notes literature nodes and permanent nodes which are the key aspects of building out the zetlen system and you can also see because it's bringing in my molecular zastin it's framing the different concepts as atoms and molecules which fits more into my my structure that I've been building out that fits more into how my brain works so you can see it's it's given a pretty solid summary here it explains tags and folders indexes and you can see here that it's even bringing in specific notes so here's my YouTube outline on topics versus tags and obsidian so it's referencing how I like to structure my notes using my own maps of content and it's giving a specific reference to that note that I dropped in from obsidian so every one of these citations here you can see here is one on how to take smart notes this is a markdown file which you can see down in the bottom here so these are notes that I've dropped in from obsidian so this just really adds a conversational element to My Vault I can go through and selectively choose which notes I want to have a conversation with drop them into the source section here and then fill out the gaps that I'm trying to add into my own note taking with things like YouTube videos voice notes and articles from the internet and what's nice is if I find this a good overview I can click save to note and it saves a new note on the side here but one thing to note is that if you refresh the page you can see that it deletes the chat conversation here but it does keep the save note on the side here so that's one reason why you want to save the notes from the conversation because you'll lose them but what you can also do is for example I could open this note here I could click convert to source and that would add it as a source on the side here so that the chat interface can now have a conversation with the saved notes that I've had another option would be to copy this note go over to obsidian create a new note call it settle cast and conversation with notebook LM and I can paste the notes here so this allows me to just quickly take my conversation that I've been having and drop it into my Vault so that I can go back and find this later and like I'll get into more later on you'll be able to then take this type of conversation and query it using an obsidian plugin that brings artificial intelligence into obsidian but I'll explain that more in a little bit but one thing I want to note here is that what I like to do when I take a conversation from AI whether it's chat gbt or perplexity or cloud or notebook LM I like to give it a tag that says contains Ai and what that does is you can see here on the side I use the auto note mover to automatically move this note into a folder in My Vault that's specifically tagged with contains AI that way I know exactly what in My Vault has been created by me and what has been created by artificial intelligence that's just my personal preference that I like to do in order to keep these things separate so I can then work through my own specific ideas without having artificial intelligence and generated content bleeding into my own ideas okay and then one last thing I just want to show you quickly here is that you can generate an audio overview conversation so I've previously generated one and basically what I did with this is I brought in all of my blog posts I brought in all of my YouTube videos all of my obsidian notes that were all related to the concept of my molecular zcast and system and then I generated an audio AIO overview that had a conversation tying together all these Concepts so then I downloaded the podcast and I went for a walk and listen to it and that helped me create the molecular zedcast and video for my YouTube channel so it was interesting to get the perspective of an AI to AIS having a conversation back and forth and then take the insights from that and apply it to the way that I communicated the molecular zedcast and system to my YouTube subscribers so just quickly I want to note that this zedcast and video the one that goes through ular zcast and specifically I have a long form video here that goes through and explains it much more in depth I've had a lot of positive feedback that it's really helped a ton of people so if you're interested in learning more about that particular inod taking system I recommend checking out that video just a quick reminder that if you find this video helpful I would love if you would please consider liking subscribing and sharing with a friend AI can feel overwhelming for a lot of people so I'm trying to make AI knowledge and learning more understandable more accessible for the average person so I'm doing my best here to continue making high quality videos and your support by subscribing and sharing with other people really helps boost my ability to continue doing this in the future and make this the full-time career that I'm trying to so I appreciate it a lot if you're interested in getting access to my obsidian templates or you just want to support me for the work the time and energy that I'm putting into making these videos please consider joining my paid membership on YouTube My paying members are who have been enabling me to continue making these videos so I appreciate your support very much thank you now let's keep going with notebook LM and obsidian now let's go to to my next favorite feature so another thing that I like to do here is use notebook LM to identify themes and connections between notes and my published works so I have one notebook called the plan and the plan is basically my long-term Five-Year Plan for using not taking systems like obsidian building out my digital Garden building out my personal Knowledge Management System and then augmenting it with artificial intelligence so to create this plan I dropped in a whole bunch of YouTube videos I dropped in websites I dropped in markdown files from obsidian I I dropped in voice notes voice memos and I took all of these 34 sources which is many thousands and thousands of words and now I'm able to just easily have a conversation about my entire plan so one of the notes that I dropped in is my fiveyear plan and how I can bring artificial intelligence into obsidian and then build out my website and build out my digital identity using all of this so now I can just take all of those Concepts expand the depth of them by bringing in other technical articles and like I mentioned before I'm able to go just generate an audio overview so I can take in all of these pieces of information all of the technical documents my research and my obsidian notes and I can generate an audio overview so this just helps me make connections between different concepts that I've Been Working On by dropping in my plans into notebook LM and then asking questions about how I can simplify and how I can build out my project management okay the next way that I use notebook LM and obsidian is to repurpose my existing content into social media or promotional purposes or use it to generate a Blog outline or long form blog post so here you can see I have a social media generator and within this social media generator notebook I have a whole bunch of different strategies for example Ada Pinterest SEO copywriting Frameworks so I did a bunch of research on the internet and with YouTube and by conversations with Taylor because she is a marketing expert and I brought in all of these resources into this notebook here along with notes from obsidian like on different courses that I've taken and my own blog posts and I effectively created a social media generator notebook and what you can see here on the side is that I had a conversation with notebook LM and I asked it to generate my style to analyze me and then I worked back and forth with it to tweak my own style so that it understood what I was trying to accomplish when converting my long form content into short form promotional material or for expanding on my blog post so I actually have a whole video that went much more in depth on how I built out this notebook called repurposing your content with notebook LM so I recommend checking out that video if you want to see more how the notebook is structured and how I actually worked through to finesse out my particular style that notebook LM now knows to use when creating the short form content or boosting my long form content but for now because this video is more on the Practical side of things rather than the how-to side of things I thought that I would show you quickly how I would actually use this notebook for one of my most recent YouTube videos so for example if I go over to my latest video It's called Master learning by teaching the fan technique using obsidian and basically what I did when making this video is I created a new alloy which is the top tier of my molecular zle casting system and I went through and found a bunch of atoms related to the concept of definement technique a bunch of singular Concepts and I built out these Concepts by making analogies to different types of mental models like the hero's journey or the uncertainty Matrix or metacognition or code so I took each of these singular Concepts and then I threaded them together and made comparisons to the concept of Defan technique which is effectively that you learn better when you teach people because you're able to identify knowledge gaps and then fill in those knowledge gaps which improves your own understanding and that gave me a lot of ideas on my own original thinking or molecules or depending on how you like to frame it so I took these molecules and then using the embed function in obsidian I'm able to just embed the Noe itself and effectively take all of my previous work and convert it into an outline of a blog post so I took all of these molecules all of the writing that I put here and I sequenced the notes together so that I effectively have 80% of a blog post on the findan technique done so I thought it would be useful to show you how I can now take this outline that I have so far add it to notebook LM alongside the video that I used to explain this and generate some ideas from notebook LM that would explain how I can complete that newsletter and perhaps Identify some themes or connections that I hadn't noticed when I was doing it on my own so the first thing I'm going to do is add a new source add the YouTube video of the fan technique you can see it's learning yep there we go so it it has already dropped the YouTube video in and effectively it has already transcribed the entire YouTube video so this is a cool way now for me to take my note that I've already created in obsidian here leveraging the fan technique and then compare and contrast it with the YouTube video that I made where I was explaining everything I was doing to see how notebook LM would suggest I can complete this blog post so one thing I want to note quickly is that if I go to open this note in finder or just in your on your desktop and I open it as a txt file you can see here that there are all of these exclam marks and then the note so what this means is that the markdown file itself is unable to recognize that this is an embedded note that is the obsidian user interface that's showing that a note is pulled from one spot to another and what I mean by that is for example if I get rid of this exclamation mark you can see that all of this cyclical nature of learning and teaching disappeared but if I put the exclamation mark back it embeds that entire note into this existing note so because I'm trying to fill in the gaps between these outlines here I want notbook LM to be able to understand what the words are in the embedded note so for this I need to actually export this note as a PDF so I can press command P export to PDF keep the file name as title margin all the fine cool click export save it to my downloads and boom there now I have a find my technique note so you can see here it kept everything it kept all of the embedded notes that's what these lines are here on the side so I was able to go to the top here click add source and then choose file to upload the PDF so now you can see that the fan technique note is in here and it has all of the text including all of the embedded information from the different molecules that I created so now let's go back to chat for a moment since I now have the fan technique video and the leveraging definement technique note and let's see I want you to create the outline of a blog post using the outline section of leveraging definement technique the PDF want you to analyze the findan technique video and compare it to this PDF file and suggest interesting ways to convert the video and PDF into a blog post so you can see here it took all of the ideas it's referencing this specific note leveraging the fan technique and it's referencing the master learning by teaching video The Fan Technique YouTube video that I created so it's identifying the intro the core idea how to leverage it as a tool and then now it's actually listening to me and it's going through and giving an analysis and comparison of the video and PDF so the PDF is a concise highlevel overview of the core concept whereas the video offers much more comprehensive and practical exploration so that's exactly the point of this I made the video while I was writing out the outline but I gave a lot more context in the video than I did in my PDF in my obsidian note so my goal with this was because I was just free flowing thinking with the YouTube video I knew that I would have an asset that I could take and then plug into notebook LM and compare it to the notes that I took on it and then just have a conversation with notebook LM to finesse the ideas that I had to convert it into a long form blog post that I could then send out as a newsletter so one of the things I was looking for was something like a title so here you can see it suggests definement technique from core principles to practical application which takes in the core ideas from the PDF and then expands on it using anecdotes from the video unlocking deeper understanding so it's giving me a lot of really good ideas here that are very aligned with the specific notes that I included and now let's say I like this I'm not going to click like because that sends the information to a human reviewer so I want to keep this private for myself but I could save this to note and you can see here that it automatically updated the note title so if I wanted to I could convert this note to a source by just clicking on it and clicking convert to source and then I'd be able to ask questions about this even if the conversation disappears so now since this is a social media generator one why don't we say something like I want you to generate short form promotional social media posts that produce the best hooks to encourage people to go watch the find my video or read the blog post okay so here are some Concepts struggling to truly understand complex to topics this could be your secret weapon link to the blog post ever feel like you're memorizing not learning here's the four step findan technique you even give me suggestions for Instagram for Pinterest descriptions and general hook strategies that are used which are the Ada model and the Pas copywriting framework that I included here so you can see how it's taking in all of the different concepts all of the different sources and information that I put in on the side here and I'm able to specifically Focus notebook LM on answering my questions about something new like a new video or a new blog post that I want to create this provides a more custom interaction with something like notebook LM as compared to perplexity or chat GPT and also the default here is that all of these notes are private so you don't have to worry about your information being used to train AI models or be seen by a human reviewer unless you happen to click the feedback button so this is just a really great way for you to build on to the notes that you're taking in obsidian the whole point of using obsidian is not to just take notes that you never use but to take notes that you're trying to actually use to improve the quality of your life or the quality of your output which could be blog writing digital gardening making YouTube videos or just having conversations with people another use case for using notebook LM with obsidian is as a data view query Builder so I went through and I took all of the best articles best YouTube videos and just resources I have in General on data view which is a plugin and obsidian that lets you create indexes I talk more about this in my automatic inbox and index tutorial video for obsidians so if you want to learn more about how data view actually works and what you can use it for please check out that video but effectively I'm able to create custom code blocks for obsidian by dropping in all of the different websites that explain how to use data view so for example I could say create a data view table that displays the number of links each note has within each linked note in a particular obsidian note so effectively take in all of the links that I have in the note and then show me the number number of links that are connected to each of those notes so you can see here it generated an answer I'm not going to test it out right now because usually I have to go back and forth a couple times to iterate on it I just wanted to very quickly show you that you can use this to create the data view table so you can just take this go into something in obsidian add the three ticks and put data view so then I can just take this and copy it into obsidian and test it if it doesn't work I'll go back and say oh this is the error please work with me to create something better so I've done this a couple times to build out my my digital Garden indexes so you can see here it's pulling from a specific fault it's flattening the links as atoms so I'm able to create very complex data view queries and I don't have to actually learn how to code which is the best part because I have included all of the coding information here for Notebook LM to use so again it takes usually a couple iterations to get it to do exactly what I'm looking for but it will be able to do it faster than me just trying to figure out on my own which I think is kind of the whole point of using AI okay and now for the final use case Cas I want to show you how I can actually use notebook LM as a sounding board for my journals so I'm going to create a new notebook here the goal of this notebook is for me to take all of my daily notes from obsidian which are some of the most popular notes that I have I write more daily notes than almost anything so you can see here I have my daily note folder and I have tons and tons of notes in here I have 342 notes from the last several years so almost a years worth of notes in here if I were to take a note every day so what I thought would be cool would be to export all of these notes into one file drop the file into notebook LM and then ask questions about my own thinking to ask questions about what jumped out at me two years ago and really to start to try and identify patterns in my thinking that will help me solve my problems better in the future this is kind of like a personal therapist though of course if anyone is struggling with mental health issues I highly recommend talking to a professional my thought with this is that I can try to solve my own blocks and start to identify patterns in my thinking a little bit faster than just sitting there and trying to solve the problem on my own to try and augment my thinking using artificial intelligence which is the whole theme of this obsidian with AI series and this actually kind of relates to the Fineman technique video because I talk about the concept of metacognition and metacognition is effectively thinking about thinking so you can use your awareness and thoughts and feelings to begin to regulate yourself so you can better plan Monitor and evaluate how your life is going and what can make it better this improves your knowledge over time so my thought thought here is effectively thoughts and feelings are what go into a journal and if I can boost my awareness of the patterns with those thoughts and feelings I'm better able to plan and monitor how my plans are going in the future so to export all 342 files you unfortunately can't do this as far as I'm aware with just the obsidian export so we're going to need to go and introduce a new plugin so I'm going to go over to community plugins and browse and type in export there's a few different options here if you want to convert this to markdown you can export markdown as a package but I'm going to try the better export PDF because that has a lot more downloads so you can see here one of the options is to add PDF metadata from the from the front matter which is good that means I keep my markdown metadata it supports internal links within the files so you can click between notes that's great if I'm referencing from one note to another and you can export multiple markdown files either a folder or specific files into one PDF file perfect that's exactly what I'm looking for so let's install that enable and go over to options so you can customize this however you want if you want to change how the page numbers are being developed and just generally how the output is going to look and you can introduce custom CSS as well if you want to have it formatted in a particular way but for now I just want to export all of my daily notes so that I have a single searchable file so let's try that and just before I do that I want to show you one more feature about this plugin so if you see if you go into settings here you can actually do a custom export where you can create a table of contents equals true document property and then you're able to list all the notes that you want and the reason that you might want to do this is because this will then customize the order that you want the notes included in the PDF so I could go through and do this with all my daily notes and introduce them all day by day and I'd be able to ensure that they're all showing up in the proper format as they are in the folder but I'm not as concerned with this at the moment because I know I'm just going to be asking questions about this using artificial intelligence which is not necessarily going to need to go in order to do that but I just thought that it was a useful feature in case you're trying to export specific notes in a particular order okay so you can see here it says in order to Quick export I can just go expert folder to PDF and I can export the entire folder contents to a PDF file now because I have so many notes I just tried this for a second and it will take a couple hours to do that so instead of doing that for my daily notes I'm going to do this with my violin practice journal because I've been learning violin and there's only a couple notes into it so let's go export folder to PDF you can see it's loading the files in the background is going through them one by one and now it shows me the entire note including all the formatting separates the dates and it includes the metad data with each one so I can now click export let's call it practice journal PDF save there we go now you can see here I've got my PDF with all of my markdown notes from obsidian here it includes all the tags it's got everything I need so now I can go back to notebook LM I can click upload a source choose file bring in the PDF and you can see here it popped up as being red it says said it doesn't work properly so I had this before with the fan technique one as well and I decided to do it a couple times before it worked properly for some reason there we go so that one works so you can see it comes up with a summary documents of beginner's initial experiences learning the violin over seven days let's ask a question what lessons can be learned from this experience that apply to life more generally ah here you go start with small manageable steps embrace the initial difficulties and be patient the importance of seeking guidance consistency is key especially when facing setbacks reflect in your progress and adjust your approach so honestly this is a great summary this is exactly the same thing that I would want to apply to my daily notes so I'm going to export my daily notes that's going to take a while and my plan is to drop that in here and be able to ask questions specifically about themes and patterns that I've identified across all of my naot taking over the last couple years so hopefully that'll give me some awareness of myself so that I'm better able to solve problems moving forward I hope that this shows you how you're able to use notebook LM a alongside obsidian you're able to generate the markdown files in obsidian which can be easily dragged and dropped into notebook LM so you can ask specific questions you can export entire folders of notes from obsidian into a PDF and then drop that entire PDF into notebook LM and then ask questions about it so there's really a lot of ways that you can use your own notes that you're taking an obsidian and mix it with sources from across the internet and then use notebook LM to combine all of your thoughts and ideas and analyze them so that you can be more effective with your personal knowledge management you can augment your personal Knowledge Management using artificial intelligence in a private and secure way and there you have it those are a few of my favorite ways to use notebook LM and obsidian it really is a complimentary pairing the ability for Notebook LM to just accept markdown files from obsidian while allowing me to drop in voice notes YouTube videos websites newsletters and other sources make it really a powerful tool to allow me to customize the specific questions that I'm asking to an AI system they allow me to really hone in on specific knowledge my personal Knowledge Management so that I can augment it with artificial intelligence through notebook LM to boost my research my writing and my learning generally that said there are a few cons of using notebook LM and I thought that it would be helpful now to give a brief overview of the pros and cons so that you have a better idea on where this particular tool fits in with my overarching knowledge management system as I integrated more with AI so the pros are that it's free you're able to use this there's a certain limit each day but to be honest I've never hit it part of the reason I use notebook LM is because I tend to go back and forth and use it as a tool rather than something that thinks for me another Pro is that it accepts markdown files which means that it integrates perfectly with obsidian and it's just really a simple way for me to integrate sources from multiple places but for example I wouldn't be able to use a Word document because that's under Microsoft's proprietary file format so I wouldn't be able to use one note for example I wouldn't be able to use use word or Excel so using markdown is a great way to keep my notes in a future proof format so that I can continue to plug it into whatever Services come out with artificial intelligence another Pro is that you're able to bring in external sources which makes it really nice to compare your own notes with notes and research that you've done on the internet the audio overview feature is a great way for you to be able to distill your entire conversation and all the sources that you've brought in so that you're able to go for a walk and listen to your thought process rather than sit at the computer and finally you can build your own style over time in each notebook for example the social media generator one understands what I want with social media production what I want to do when I want to convert my long form writing or YouTube videos into short form promotional materials so I've built my style over time and because I built this once now I can just drop in any new YouTube video I make in the future and it'll give you suggestions that are aligned with my own style so that's just a cool way that you can build out each notebook almost as a dedicated tool that's aligned with the goals that you have for that particular tool okay now let's take a look at the cons so as with any cloud-based system you have to be concerned about privacy I know that I mentioned and showed you at the beginning that notebook LM doesn't use your personal data to train notebook lm's AI model which is I believe Gemini but if you do give feedback it's possible a human reviewer could see it so you are uploading something in a cloud-based system that it's up to you whether or not you trust how that's going to go in the future for myself I don't want to put like patentable ideas in here I'm pretty cautious about the type of stuff I'm uploading but that's just how I generally treat artificial intelligence tools I take everything with a grain of salt and I want to ensure that my best ideas stay local to my computer so the fact that notebook LM isn't a locally operated artificial intelligence tool to me is a huge con another con is that you can't suggest connections within obsidian like you can't have notebook LM read the knowledge graph so it's losing a lot of context which is one of the main values of using obsidian another con is that you have to add the notes you want each time it's not as though the AI is updating its context constantly you have to be very selective here you can't save the conversations natively they just get deleted each time so you have to save each portion of the chat into its own separate note or copy and paste the entire conversation into your own note in obsidian and tag it with something like contains AI so that's just a little manual and there's not really any customization here the only features that you can use this for are ones that Google gives you that notebook LM provides for example like the study guide or the briefing doc the FAQ the timeline and of course the conversation and the audio overview so these are all really excellent features don't get me wrong but it's limited in what it can do because it's trying to appeal to everyone now all that said notebook LM really is a great way to get going with integrating AI with your your obsidian Vault it allows me to boost my ideas my writing my research and really increases the speed of my learning over time it's actually kind of mind-blowing how quickly I can learn when I'm able to take all those custom sources and then drop in my planning notes from obsidian to have a very tailored and customized learning regime set up for me so I find notebook LM to be a very powerful tool that I use all of the time but now that you've seen the easiest way to use AI with obsidian where you don't have to install anything separate you can just just go on and use your Google account I thought it would be helpful for me to start going into more actual integrated tools with obsidian where you can take Ai and integrate it to your vault in a local private and free way so that you're able to take some of the features that we've talked about with notebook LM but build it into your Vault to expand it so it can actually augment your entire personal Knowledge Management System rather than just some selected sources this next option is truly integrated with obsidian but it takes a little longer to explain which is why I'm going to talk about it in its own video wow so that only took point 3 seconds to run my entire Vault that's wildly fast co-pilot chat works very well I was able to have a vault Q&A no problem whatsoever I can ask questions about a specific note I can ask questions broadly on my whole Vault and it it's able to do a semantic analysis and honestly it worked really well I was impressed this next video that I've recorded is honestly my favorite that I've made so far so I'm really excited to show it to you if you found this video helpful I would love if you would please consider liking subscribing and sharing sharing with a friend your support really means a lot to me and it helps me continue growing so I can continue making this my full-time career so thank you very much if you're looking to go deeper into notebook LM specifically I actually have an AI learning playlist that walks through a few of my favorite features much more in depth I walk through how you can use the AI overview feature the AI podcast to expand the style of your learning and your research with AI where you can take your research and go for a walk for example and just listen to the conversation it's a nice way to step away from your desk and introduce a change of pace to your desk I also walk through how you can use notebook LM to repurpose long form content into social media posts and I walk through specifically a bunch of different styles and formats and ways that you can do this effectively and finally I have a video that helps you understand the privacy policy of notbook LM more so you can understand better the difference between privacy and confidentiality stay tuned for the next video where I actually walk through how to integrate AI with obsidian in a safe private and local way thanks for watching and I will see you then