I came across this post on Medium about using an Obsidian plugin to move a large number of notes contained in a folder within your Obsidian vault to Google Notebook LM. As I read it, I knew I had to give it a try.
This blog post will detail how my experiment went and whether it is really an effective way to circumvent Google Notebook LM’s current 50-note limitation.
Secondly, is it really worth it when Obsidian users can use Obsidian community plugins such as Smart Connections and Obsidian Co-Pilot to combine your vault with large language model-driven Artificial Intelligence?
Plugins I used during this experiment
The plugin I downloaded for this experiment was Better Export PDF. This allows you to export all notes in a folder to a single PDF, which I could then import into Google NotebookLM.
I found it not the easiest plugin to use. It starts working straight away, opening the note it’s processing on the current screen, but you have to actually press the export button and specify a filename for a PDF to be saved.
How my experiment went
It can also take a while to create a PDF. My initial thought was to convert my slip box notes into a single PDF, as I would have been interested in what Google Notebook LM’s podcast generator would have made of the 1,731 permanent notes I have created since September 2021.
But I decided against it, so I decided to use my 2024 writing folder as a source. It contains a more reasonable 73 files made up of posts I had published on my blog or on Medium during 2024. Processing these notes into a single PDF only took a few minutes.
Once the PDF was created, I opened Google Notebook LM and uploaded the PDF file. Google Notebook LM takes a few minutes to process the PDF and incorporate the content inside a notebook.
Once the PDF is processed, Artificial Intelligence can generate a summary and answer questions via the built-in chatbot powered by Google Gemini Large Language Model. You can also do what I did and get the AI to generate a podcast based on the PDF’s contents.
The generated podcast has two AI-generated hosts who discussed the posts I had written and published in 2024. You can listen to the AI generated podcast below
Conclusion
While the experiment was a success, I don’t see myself wanting to do this regularly. As I mentioned in the introduction, the Obsidian community has provided plugins with Artificial Intelligence, which enables my Obsidian vault to combine my Zettelkasten and journal with the AI capability of a large language model.
The only real reason I can see myself doing this in the future is to convert some of my Obsidian notes into a podcast.
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Further reading
Google NotebookLM my first thoughts
Why I changed my Obsidian vault AI from Obsidian Smart Connections to Obsidian Copilot
What is a Large Language Model?