NEW NotebookLM AI Agent!

**Julian Goldie** (0:00)
So we have a brand new update from NotebookLM, where there's three big changes to NotebookLM itself, which is a powerful free research engine that we can use, for example, as an AI agent for creating all sorts of research reports. You can create videos, podcasts, et cetera. I'm gonna show you the new setup here that's just come out recently. So first of all, you get a better chat experience. You can actually plug in sources, as you can see, and you can add your own sources as well. And it's got over 100 curated software skills, so you can get better, deeper research, more complex analysis. So that's the first big update. And then number two is that you can visualize data, PDFs, images, and Excel sheets as well. And then finally, there's an agentic research companion, which means you can now start a notebook by entering your loose ideas and questions into the chat, and then NotebookLM will guide you through it. Now, what we've actually set up with our agentic operating system, and if you don't have something like this setup, I definitely recommend it, because you can basically manage Notebook in a more powerful way, where you can segment everything. You can see your library of all the Notebooks you've got set up. You can do more research inside this section and ask it questions. You can chat with your Notebooks as well. So if we go to the chat here, we can actually speak to our Notebook directly. And then also we have a studio here where we can generate anything from that particular Notebook. So that could be like a presentation, audio view, video, my map, infographic flashcards, et cetera. Now, we've used an MCP to connect these. And the thing that I would say here is like, if you saw Fable 5 recently get taken down by Claude, then you know that it's much better to have a system where you can plug models in and out. And it doesn't really matter what happens next. So you have much more control over the system. So this is why we've set up this agent here. And then what we could do from here is we can take the assets that we generate with AI. So we've got, for example, the research reports, we have the slide decks, we have the videos and the podcasts and everything else, and even have infographics. And bear in mind that you can generate all of this for free using this setup. So let me guide you through it. This is something I call the instant research engine with NotebookLM, because basically you can have like a really well researched report or podcast or video, whatever you want, and you can just feed it a pile of links, right?
So this is powerful stuff.
Now, the engine that powers it is NotebookLM. But as you can see, NotebookLM is super messy itself. If we go directly into NotebookLM, you can see that we've got Notebooks all over the place. We don't know which ones have videos generated. We can't see everything that was generated. There's no real library there of everything that we've created. That's why you want something like this, where you can see everything you've built in one click glance, and then you can get access to it straight away, right? It saves a lot of time. It's a lot more efficient. Then if you need to go through some of your Notebooks here, it's much easier to see it this way than it is to look at it like with a big grid, and then you have to look through the whole list. You could do the list set up here as well, but again, you don't really know what you've created, or what's set up, or what each one of these is about. It's much easier to organize it like this as you can see.
We can ask it one question, and then it can answer from every source with citations. This is a really powerful research engine that we've set up.
For example, if we say, okay, what's the one thing that a builder should know about the June 2026 release, then it comes up with answers and sources like you can see. It comes up with, for example, the new Cohere North Mini Code Update, the GLM 5.2 update, the new research from Hermes Agent, the new release. And so like in one single question, you can get the latest news and it's really, really recent. Whereas, for example, if you ask that same question inside Claude or something like that, it's usually quite outdated, and you'll find stuff from like two weeks ago or three weeks ago. This is all stuff within the last few days. So the way this works is like you can plug in your sources, the engine answers, and then you get cited answers, which makes it a much more powerful setup.