Do you remember CliffsNotes?
The iconic yellow-and-black books summarized all manner of literary works. They digested the plot and detailed the themes and symbolism. CliffsNotes referred to them as “study guides,” but many used them to get around reading the full-length version.
(Fun fact: CliffsNotes started in 1958 with a whole line of Shakespeare summaries and continues publishing today.)
Critics of CliffsNotes argue that the surface analysis loses many of the nuances and themes of the work. Teachers and others considered using CliffsNotes as cheating. But that wasn’t really what many students were thinking when they read the CliffsNotes the night before an assignment was due.
CliffsNotes came back in our mind with the latest conversations about NotebookLM from Google. It’s taking the business world by storm, so we asked Robert Rose, CMI’s chief strategy advisor, for his take. Read on or watch this video:
Is NotebookLM the 21st century CliffsNotes? Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet? What would NotebookLM ask if it could speak?
What’s up with Google’s AI app?
Like most things from Google, NotebookLM is still in “experimental mode.” Billing it as a notetaking app at its December 2023 U.S. launch, Google has added new features in the past 10 months and it has a growing fan base.
As it stands today, NotebookLM offers a way to talk to and get summaries of documents, videos, and audio files uploaded into its system. It does remind me of a much more sophisticated and advanced version of CliffsNotes.
Users can upload the document, or source, as Google calls it, then have NotebookLM summarize it, create a study guide, critique it, or answer questions about it in a chat-style interface. I’m blown away by how easy and natural it is to “talk to my documents.”
But the feature released in September that has everybody frothy is the Audio Overview. It outputs the document as a friendly podcast-style audio file. The AI hosts — an unnamed man and woman who sound young and energetic — give a casual back-and-forth overview. To put it into a professional sports metaphor, the male AI does the play-by-play commentating, and the female AI gives the color commentary and insight by asking questions or providing answers.
It’s impressive, especially as the technology adds one of my favorite new words — disfluencies — into their speech. The technology includes false starts, filler words, ums, ahhs, likes — all those natural language vocals that make the hosts sound more human. They really sound like two young people chatting about your source document and what it all means.
A few people have proclaimed that NotebookLM can automate business podcasts with these AI personalities. But is that really the best use case? Why would you value “someone” else doing it where the only creative input is the document you’re curating? It seems like a thin moat of differentiation and value.
Does NotebookLM produce something really different?
Is something different at play with NotebookLM that can add actual usefulness?
Based on my experimentations with it, the answer is yes. It fits with the broader themes about AI that I’ve discussed lately, and thus the most recent CliffsNotes metaphor.
I uploaded the big bucket of numbers from CMI’s 2025 B2B content marketing outlook that will be released next week. I asked it to write a summary. As you would expect, it gave a straightforward synopsis in about two pages of bullet points of the main topics and results. But it also wrote a section with key takeaways and actionable insights.
It seems impressive. However, after getting beyond the magnificent language assembly, I realized that the takeaways and insights aren’t insightful or wise. They simply highlight the results in a book-report-like format.
The key actions include “prioritize strategy and goal setting,” “embrace data-driven decision making,” and “invest in technology and training.” While all that sounds nice, it’s the equivalent of reading a report about the best practices for baking a cake and the key actions include “start with fresh ingredients,” “make sure you mix everything well,” and “ensure your oven is working.”
So, I asked NotebookLM for one key takeaway a marketer should get from reading this report. Well, it couldn’t give me just one, which makes sense, given it’s built to summarize. It gave me three, one of which was “top performing B2B marketers attribute their success to a deep understanding of their target audience and the creation of high-quality content.”
Again, that sounds impressive, but coming back to the cake-baking report analogy, it’s the equivalent of saying, “The best bakers attribute their success to the care they put into learning how to bake a cake and the creation of high-quality cakes.”
So, then I tried the audio feature since that’s the most exciting aspect of NotebookLM. I asked it to provide a podcast-style audio overview. The eight-minute overview was impressive. But again, it just delivered an overview of the results without any insights. The hosts made comments like, “Yeah, good quality content is hard to make,” and “Wow, B2B marketers are frustrated at the quality of their results.”
These results mimic what I see in all types of generative AI solutions because that’s what they’re built to do. It’s all plot and no story. Generative AI tools are fantastic at recognizing patterns, summarizing, structuring and providing the what-happened part of any story. It’s much like the 21st century version of CliffsNotes. The magic happens when a human combines their experience to look beyond the “what happened” and derive or assign meaning to it.
Is this The Road Not Taken?
I have two thoughts. The first is that NotebookLM’s value isn’t diminished by its summarizing emphasis; it reminds you of the tool’s potential value. If you want a literal summary of a document, it can be extremely helpful. If you want an eight-minute audio version summarizing a 50-page corporate earnings report, a research study, a technical document, source code, or almost anything else, it is truly valuable. It can act as a study guide when you don’t have time to consume the whole document.
But that first thought lives in tension with the second, and it’s the same caution CliffsNotes makes about its products. Valuable friction exists when you read, consume, and find the meaning in the work. You must recognize that it is better to read the original sometimes, so you can use your experience, empathy, creativity, and knowledge (largely your wisdom) to connect the unobvious dots in the work. That’s what often leads to valuable insights, and you may not find them unless you read the entire work.
One of my favorite poems is The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. I asked NotebookLM for a summary, and it gave what CliffsNotes would have. Then, I asked for the major takeaway, and NotebookLM gave the same lesson that millions of speeches at graduation, hundreds of television commercials, and business books have concluded: “(T)aking the road less traveled can lead to a more unique and fulfilling life.”
Except that’s not what the poem is about. If you read the poem carefully, thoroughly, and multiple times, you realize that isn’t the point. The title is The Road Not Taken, not The Road I Took. The poem is about what the author didn’t do, not what he did. Frost says clearly the roads are largely identical and there is no difference between the two. Further, the author says in the future he’ll be telling this story with a sigh, meaning he’s not necessarily happy about the less traveled road or not taking the one more traveled. He leaves the reader with the ambiguous, “That has made all the difference.” The poem itself is a commentary that life choices are what you make of them. There is no right road to travel. The difference happens after you choose.
So, if you choose the NotebookLM road, don’t see it as a crutch to save you from the friction of making meaning from the complexities and complications of ideas. See it as a companion that can help you move more fluidly from idea to idea and spend the time on the ones that really matter.
That is your choice.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute