‘Have your bot speak to my bot’: can AI productivity apps turbocharge my life?

I tried out organisational software to help streamline my work and build a ‘second brain’. I never knew there were so many different ways to take notes…

Steven Johnson has a reputation as a research software nerd. The author of 13 nonfiction books, he’s constantly looking for digital tools to streamline his creative process. So when large language models – which power text-generating AI tools such as ChatGPT – started getting attention, he was most interested in what they could mean for organising information.

In 2022, an article Johnson wrote about LLMs for the New York Times caught the eye of researchers at Google Labs, the tech company’s experimental AI arm, who came to him with a proposition: would he help them develop the kind of digital research assistant he’d been dreaming of? The result is NotebookLM, a note-taking tool that uses AI to help organise, summarise and answer questions about any information you give it. “The way we think about it is it’s a tool for understanding things,” Johnson says.