NotebookLM is the research tool I have been recommending to everyone for six months, here is why

I do a lot of research. Academic papers, long-form journalism, recorded talks, technical documentation. The standard workflow is reading, highlighting, taking notes, trying to synthesize across multiple sources into something coherent. NotebookLM changes that workflow in a way that is hard to go back from once you have tried it.

The core idea is that you upload your sources, PDFs, websites, YouTube URLs, and then everything you ask is answered strictly from those sources with direct citations. Not from the general knowledge of the AI, from your specific documents. That distinction matters enormously for research because you can trust that an answer is traceable to something real rather than a plausible-sounding confabulation.

The YouTube integration is particularly useful. You paste a URL and immediately get a summary, a full transcript and the ability to chat with the content. For recorded conference talks or long interviews where you need specific information without watching the whole thing this is a genuine time saver.

The Audio Overview feature is the one that surprises people when I show them. It takes your research sources and turns them into a podcast-style conversation between two AI hosts discussing the material. It is an unusual format but it is genuinely useful for absorbing information from a large body of material without reading all of it again.

The Persona Cloning capability is something I use for a different purpose. Upload a collection of transcripts or writing from a specific person and the AI can answer questions in their style and from their body of knowledge. I used this to build a reference tool from a researcher whose work I study closely.