Tool to help researching historical data

[Mr_sukebe]

For those who like to try to create historically "inspired" scenarios, something came to my attention yesterday that I thought worth mentioning.

I'm guessing that most of us are aware of ChatGPT, which sources data from all over the place and has several degrees of accuracy, depending upon your subscription.

My son showed me a video yesterday about a new AI tool called Notebook LM from google.  I'd never heard of it before.

In short, it's something of an AI hybrid solution, where you can upload up to 50 "assets" (e.g. PDFs) to your "query", and when you then ask the type of questions that you might have put to ChatGPT, it'll source it's answer from the assets that you've uploaded.

I gave it a test this morning, by uploading around 20 pdfs that I'd found on the net about the Iran/Iraq and Desert Storm wars.  Those pdfs were anything from 100+ pages to 600, so pretty large.  Uploading was very fast, maybe 2 mins for the lot.  Post that, it was dead easy to ask questions such as "how many tanks did Iraqi divisions have in Kuwait".

The benefit over ChatGPT is IMO the ability to deliberately limit the sources of info, so you're not going to get some random opinions mixed in from for example certain political spectrums.  In short, I'd expect the data to be more accurate.

Going through the documents myself would have taken man days.  Notebook LM gave me the answer straight away.  Utterly awesome.

From what I could see, Notebook LM was free (at least at the moment) and before anyone asks, I have no relationship to Google.