Turn all your weekly newsletters into a Podcast with NotebookLM

I get tons of newsletters every week, most of them related to AI technology. As you know, especially in the AI field, things change fast - faster than I can really keep up with. So sometimes I'm afraid of missing important things, especially if I can't read them every day.
But since I'm sometimes on the move - walking, driving, whatever - I have plenty of time to listen to podcasts. So I thought, why not have a podcast of the same hot news that I get in my email every day?

NotebookLM makes it possible.

If you don't know much about NotebookLM, check out my previous blog post about this amazing piece of technology from Google.

Google also offers another incredible product for creating podcasts, including for educational purposes, called illuminate. However, you have to sign up for a waiting list. I will cover this in a future post.

I am using Mac and Apple Mail, so this tutorial will presume you’re using these tools too. If not, you might have similar functions like export and print in your email program.

This is how it works in a nutshell
After setting up your email and NotebookLM, you'll create a smart folder in Apple Mail to aggregate your weekly news, export these emails as a PDF, and then import them into NotebookLM to generate a podcast. Here's how it all comes together.

If you're curious how this might sound, here is an example of my llamaindex newsletter emails.

Step by Step:

1. Open Apple Mail and create the smart mailbox

Create a filter as follows (with subject "news" or "newsletter"; whatever suits your situation) and limit it to emails from the last week.

1. Now, to listen to your newsletters every week:

Select all emails and open File > Export as PDF

1. Now go to NotebookLM and upload the news PDF we just exported.

Then hit generate to create the podcast.

After a few minutes, your podcast should be ready to listen to. That's it!

Now you can listen to your newsletter on the go, and if you like, you can share it with others too 😄

Limitations:

Despite being incredibly powerful and simple, there are a few limitations. As of today, the duration is time-limited and NotebookLM will pick the topics to "talk" about in the podcast by itself, so it will have to pick and choose.

However, NotebookLM will soon be rolling out a new feature where you can tell the podcast hosts what to focus on in the script, so you can choose whatever you want to focus on, e.g. "focus on AI topics from OpenAI" or something like that. So, stay tuned :)