Google NotebookLM got a significant wave of updates.
The old workflow was to upload your sources, ask a question, copy the answer, and then paste it somewhere else to work on it more.
That has now changed.
Now it doesn't just surface information from your documents. It generates deliverables directly from them — slide decks, podcasts, reports, infographics, data tables.
Here's a use case many people haven't found yet.
Quiz generation for live events. Upload your speaker notes and presentations. Generate multiple-choice questions grounded in that exact content. Drop them into Slido or Mentimeter.
You just eliminated the most tedious part of event facilitation: chasing speakers for questions that typically arrive, if they arrive at all, the morning of the session.
The slide deck tool is worth a look, with honest expectations attached. The output downloads as static images, not editable elements — a real bummer if you need accessible or client-ready materials. Ross Stevenson shows a partial fix: a Revise button lets you annotate individual slides and regenerate the full deck. Iterative refinement, not direct editing. Helpful, but it's not a PowerPoint replacement yet.
The real value is structural
Load it with everything a presentation needs. Generate a detailed deck. Use that output to stress-test your narrative before a single real slide gets built. Jeff Su, a former Google employee who has one of the more thorough productivity walkthroughs on YouTube, calls this the most underrated use case. Given how many hours designers spend outlining before design even starts, that tracks.
One more thing worth setting up are Gems, Gemini's custom instruction templates. Build one pre-loaded with your quiz writing standards, and every source you run through it generates questions that meet your targets. Set it up once. Reap the benefits over and over.
One honest caveat
NotebookLM's accuracy comes from staying grounded in your sources. That same constraint makes it creatively inert. Scenario writing, branching narratives, emotionally resonant copy; none of that happens here. It synthesizes. It doesn't imagine.
That's not a knock. It's just the boundary. If you want to get better at the creative side of the equation — designing learning that actually earns attention and drives behavior — that's exactly what Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro is about.
