When to use Gemini vs. Notebook LM

| Lana

When it comes to webinars, you can strategically leverage both Gemini and NotebookLM to achieve your goals of creating recaps and getting insights from the source materials like transcripts, chats, and the presentation.

When to Leverage Gemini

You should leverage Gemini for tasks that require direct content generation, rephrasing, summarization, and quick, concise answers.

  • Recaps: Gemini is excellent for drafting engaging and concise recaps by providing the raw content like an anonymized transcript and presentation. Ask Gemini to:
    • Summarize key discussions or presentations into paragraphs or bullet points.
    • Rephrase technical information into more accessible language.
    • Draft compelling introductions, conclusions, or social media posts for the recap.
    • Generate discussion questions for future engagement.
  • Concise Insights: For quick insights, Gemini can:
    • Extract specific answers to questions or highlight key pain points that were discussed.
    • Summarize the core takeaways of a long discussion into a few sentences.
    • Help you rephrase existing text to be more impactful or for a specific audience (e.g., leadership).
  • Ad-hoc Queries: If you have a specific question about the content (e.g., “What was the main concern about Feature X?”), Gemini can quickly process the text and give you a direct answer.

When to Leverage NotebookLM

You should leverage NotebookLM for tasks that require deep analysis, synthesizing information across multiple documents, identifying themes, and maintaining a structured knowledge base for ongoing internal reference.

  • Collecting Insights for Leadership Teams: NotebookLM excels here because you can upload all your materials for multiple sessions over time. It can then help you:
    • Identify recurring themes and pain points across several webinars on related topics (e.g., common challenges mentioned across all sessions, not just one).
    • Synthesize customer feedback from various sources to create a comprehensive view of customer needs or sentiment.
    • Track evolving insights over time by adding new documents to the same notebook.
    • Generate structured summaries that pull out key insights, trends, and actionable takeaways for a summary brief.
    • “Chat with your sources”: You can ask NotebookLM open-ended questions like “What are the common challenges attendees face with X?” and it will pull relevant passages from all your uploaded documents.
  • Structured Knowledge Base: Use it to build an organized repository of all your webinar content. This makes it easy to revisit past discussions, find specific information, and build a long-term resource for your team and leadership.
  • Preparing for Strategic Discussions: If you need to brief leadership on customer sentiment or knowledge gaps related to any topic, NotebookLM can help you consolidate evidence and arguments from various sessions into a cohesive narrative.

Combined Workflow

  1. Preparation (Gemini/Manual): Initially use Gemini for quick tasks like pulling initial summaries from individual documents or drafting quick recaps for social media.
  2. Deep Dive & Synthesis (NotebookLM): Upload all raw materials into NotebookLM. Use it to conduct deeper analysis, compare insights across multiple sessions, and identify overarching themes for internal leadership summaries.
  3. Final Output (Gemini/Manual): Once you’ve synthesized the insights in NotebookLM, you can then use Gemini to help draft the final, polished leadership brief or internal report based on those aggregated insights.

I used Gemini to help shape this post so I could spend less time writing—and more time putting these concepts into practice as a community manager. See Smarter Community Management: From Prompt to Practice.

Prompt: When should I leverage Gemini and when should I leverage Notebook LM? I create external-facing recaps and also would like to collect insights from webinars to share internally with leadership teams. I upload the transcript, chat, and presentation.

Why Gemini: I preferred the Gemini response over the other AI tools since it understandably had more insight into itself and NotebookLM as Google products.