Useful updates to NotebookLM and ChatGPT – Academic Technology at Dickinson

We will continue to provide updates on any changes to AI platforms we think may be useful for faculty and students. If you have suggestions of your own, whether for new tools, updates, or how you’ve used them, please let us know in the comments or send an email to academictechnology@dickinson.edu

1. 1. NotebookLM can create text summaries of YouTube. There were other tools that could do this before, but this is the first that includes as part of a free application. To create a summary, create a New Notebook on the opening screen, and where you add sources, add a link to YouTube video in the Links section. Once you’ve added your sources, select it in the sources list on the left to see the transcript and a summary. From here, you can interact with it as you would any other text source. Two caveats, the video must be public and it can’t be brand new. The cutoff seems to be a couple of days.
  2. NotebookLM can also take texts and turn them into a podcast format, with two “hosts” discussing the topic. The audio file below was generated based off of two academic texts on humor: “Humor, Comedy, and Consumer Behavior” and the introduction to Philosophy East and West. To create your own, create a New Notebook and add the text sources as text. Click “Notebook guide” bottom right and then the button to Generate a “Deep dive conversation”.
  3. Finally, ChatGPT will be introducing “Canvas”. This is a very similar to the “artifacts” feature from Anthropic in Claude. It allows you to see the text you are working on in one panel while suggesting changes in the running chat. I’ve seen this most often used for coding in Claude as it is also possible to execute and test the code that was written or modified by the AI direclty in the browser depending on the language. This can be useful for texts as well as you continue to refine and edit. You can read more about it on TechCrunch.