These two new Google’s NoteBooklm cement features as one of my favorite study applications

Although AI tools are incredibly divisor and I remain very skeptical in general (especially as a person who earns his life writing for the Internet), I must give accessories to the automobile of Google, which is the rare AI tool that I found that meets my standards to be both ethical And useful.

This large language model only draws the content you put in it, which makes it an excellent way to organize your notes, remove key ideas and increase your productivity. And now, a new update allows you to use it to create flashcards and quizs, which makes it a perfect study companion – and it is always free.

What the notebook can do

If you are not familiar with the capabilities of notebooklm, here is a quick overview: you start by downloading your documents on “notebooks”, which you can consider as your Unique Source of Truth on a given subject. (An SSOT is a benchmark where you keep all the information, resources and materials related to everything you do.) You can download local files, your Google Drive files, links to websites or YouTube videos, or an old text copied and exhausted. This is particularly useful for students, because you can enter links to articles mentioned in your study equipment, download your teacher’s PDFs, or even add digital copies of your manual, putting all your approved study documents in one place.

You can then ask the chatbot questions on the equipment, ask him to create an audio “podcast” of people discussing the content (with which you can then interact), and more. I use it most often when I work on a major project: I enter all the interviews I have done, all the research equipment I have and any other related elements, then I ask him to help me find quotes or develop a plan. It is also ideal for summarizing and organizing my notes and class documents when I prepare for an examination of higher education.

And with the last update, you have more options: along the secondary menu, you will see buttons for Flash cards And Quiz next to Mental cards And Audio preview.

Testing new Notebooklm features

To test these new capacities, I chose from my collection of notebooks filled with documents for a certification exam for which I studied.

Quiz instantly

Notebooklm previously allowed you to ask him to create quizzes, but that would simply generate raw text practices with a response key at the end. The new quiz feature is much more involved.

The quiz he generated from seven pdf of materials was extremely detailed and easy to use. He asked a question, gave me four options and, after clicking one, told me if it was good or bad, and included an explanation to explain why the right answer was correct. All the information was drawn directly from my own materials, so I did not have to worry about checking the supply.

Flash cards without effort

There are a ton of flashcard applications and I examined a lot, but I never stayed with any of them because the creation of flash cards is invariably tedious – or costly. On the other hand, the generates of flashcard card notebooks were easy to use and, once again, drawn directly from my materials.

There is not much to say about them – they are flashcards; You simply return them back and forth to reveal questions and answers, but in particular, and unlike other Flashcard applications, Notebooklm has no way to indicate if you have a card response. Some other applications will ask you to indicate how you have done so that they can show you this card again, in accordance with the leitner method of the Flashcard review. However, this does not mean that this approach to flash cards is terrible because it adds additional useful features. For example, once you have returned a card by clicking on it to reveal the answer, Notebooklm adds a Explain button. Click on it to get more context on the answer, or to see exactly where, from your downloaded materials, the card has been generated.

Notebooklm is one of my favorite study applications

I wrote on all kinds of learning and study techniques, and I used most of them myself, whether for work, higher education or my own personal development. I am deliberate on most AI tools not only because they can be inaccurate, but because they provide so much shortcuts that it is more difficult to learn and keep information. Notebooklm, meanwhile, facilitates the study by using proven methods, and as it only draws information that you provide (and therefore probably making confidence), you can trust its release.

The addition of quizs and flashcards makes it an even more powerful and useful study tool than it was already, and that says a lot. I will use them both to prepare for my next exam.