I paired NotebookLM with Perplexity for a week, and it feels like they’re meant to work together

I’ve been using Google’s AI-powered personalized research assistant, NotebookLM, since it was launched as an experimental product, and I’ve covered it a bunch recently. And honestly? I’m still not over it, and it’s easily my favorite AI productivity tool.

I’ve always used NotebookLM independently. Despite seeing people experiment and pair NotebookLM with tools like OneNote, I never felt the need to team it up with anything else, since what it offered felt complete on its own.

But in the past week, I decided to finally switch things up, and brought another AI tool I’ve been playing around with for a while now into the mix: Perplexity. My intention here wasn’t to find a NotebookLM replacement. Instead, I wanted to see what would happen if I used both of them together.

Would I go back to using NotebookLM on its own like I have for months? Or would it completely transform my workflow, for the better? To my surprise, it was the latter, and the two AI tools complement each way better than I expected.