Fall weather has finally made it here to Wisconsin. For most of the season, we've had more summer-like weather here in the Madison area, but last week we finally started to cool off and it was time to start wearing my hoodies outside. Cooler weather means that we can expect to eventually get snow, but for right now, I'm enjoying the cooler weather. It is a jeans and hoodies type of weather!
On to other news, for the last week and half to two weeks, I've been working with a new tool from Google. As we all know from the countless articles written about AI and the things it could do, it was inevitable that AI was going to influence our lives in one way or the other. The news articles have intrigued me, and I've dabbled a bit with Microsoft's CoPilot. I threw some stuff at CoPilot and it was fun to see what it came back to me with. I asked for facts, for opinions, for advice, and even tried images. It was all fun, but I just didn't see a use for my pursuits.
For the last couple of years, I've also been looking into note taking systems, so when I came across the Google NotebookLM app, I wanted to look into it closer. Having a note taking system that closely integrates into my Google account would be great. As I read about the NotebookLM app, it became apparent that it wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be. Little did I know that I may have found a use for AI with my endeavors.
At it's core, NLM follows the conventional thinking about notebooks and notes. You can have multiple notebooks, and each notebook can have many notes. This was nothing new from many of the note taking apps I've used in this journey. What I discovered with further exploring and use would really show to be useful.
The AI part of NLM is the fact that you can "sources" to your notebooks. These sources can be documents, images, PDFs, web pages, or even YouTube videos. With your added sources added to the notebook, you can then ask NLM to give you analysis from these sources. These queries can be about one particular source, but it can also use all of your sources to come to an answer.
I decided to create a notebook for this web site, my personal blog. I gave it sources, mainly all of my personal web sites, including this blog. I then started with having it do a summary analysis of each web site. I wanted to see how the AI evaluated the site and maybe get some ideas of where I could improve them. My ultimate goal was to use this blog, along with all of the web sites, as a way to get fresh blog post ideas. NLM did not disappoint.
NLM gave some interesting summaries of each site. It was helpful to read what it found was the core theme and information about each web site. I then asked NLM to give me blog post ideas using all of my sources. It gave me a few really obvious ideas, but it also shared some good ideas, ideas I hadn't really looked at. I'm working with it and continue to gather more blog post ideas and hope to use those topics for the future.
I'm just getting started with NLM. More exploration and refining my techniques, I hope it will assist me to further expand this blog and my personal web sites.
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