I turned Perplexity to a lightweight NotebookLM with this feature

If you use Google’s NotebookLM often, one of the reasons why you probably keep returning to it is because it lets you control your knowledge base and get answers grounded in your own sources. Since it only references sources you’ve fed it and creates an AI that essentially only has expertise in the materials you provide, you don’t need to worry as much about hallucinations.

While NotebookLM’s learning features are certainly impressive, its source-grounded nature is still what I found most impressive. I’ve tested other tools that claim to do something similar, and haven’t been as impressed. Well, it turns out that Perplexity has a (wildly underrated) feature that lets you achieve a very similar source-grounded experience.

You can set sources for search in Perplexity

Source-grounded insights like NotebookLM

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine, and it excels at real-time web search. Within seconds of asking it a question, it can retrieve relevant information by pulling information from reputable web sources and then summarizing its findings conversationally. While its primary function is to answer questions using the web, I recently came across a feature that lets you limit it to using only the sources you provide to answer your queries.

The Set sources for search feature, which was formerly called Focus, allows you to narrow down Perplexity’s results by…