It's all different now

No, I'm not just saying that because it's 2026 and I have the radiating feeling of "this year will be different" (however those who know me know this year will have plenty of changes). What I'm referring to is the way that people can absorb information these days, specifically in academia. Students study through different means, Professors lecture leveraging different tools and each, ideally, leading to better retention of lessons. These things have changed since I have been in College and it's incredibly interesting to look at from a third person perspective.

People think that AI is just synthesizing information, turning life into one big TL;DR. While yes, I am a heavy user myself of the "Summarize this" phrase, I'd also like to talk a little bit about some of the new tools that have come out that we use in our Master's program.

And furthermore, this trend has inspired me to create an MVP (minimum viable product) for an idea I had that relates to this, I'll share this towards the end. For now, let's get into a couple of products that I've learned about over the last year, kicking things off with my favorite...

Notebook LM

Solid name, not self explanatory though. I showed my family after being at home for the holiday's and they were blown away, hopefully you can have a fraction of that reaction.

​Notebook LM is "Google's experimental AI-powered research assistant that helps users understand, summarize, and generate content from their own uploaded documents"

So yes, it's technically experimental, but I use it all the time, same goes for many of my peers. It works simply, say I need to read a 30 page pdf. on something like supply chain management, or a business strategy case, I can drop the pdf. into notebook LM and then choose an output from a few different options.
​
This is where I think the genius comes into play. Say if you're an auditory or visual learner, I upload the pdf, powerpoint, or whichever type of document into notebookLM and then you can choose which output best appeals to you. For example, an audio file. Here, you'll have a podcast generated within minutes, customized to either be a deep dive or surface level skim.

The podcast is coined "The Deep Dive" with one male and female host, both make the show quite enjoyable and truly indistinguishable from a real podcast. They scoff, cough and "hmm" just as any other host would do. So instead of highlighting and underlining, I'm listening to a podcast on my way to class. You can even have an interactive mode, where you can tune in as a "listener" like a radioshow and ask questions to these fake hosts.

Maybe you're a visual learner - notebookLM can generate a quick visual aid and an audio file to accompany it. Think of it like a powerpoint with an audio file, you could start a fairly interesting youtube channel with just this output and surely people would tune in. You can make infographics, slide decks, flashcards and more.

Less to say it's an insane tool, and if you haven't used it, I highly recommend it. I'm sure there are other audio generators like eleven labs or something else, but this is the one I'm familiar with and you should look into it.

Gamma.app

This is a newer one to me

Okay so you can do pretty similar stuff in notebooklm, but I had a professor recently show me this one and thought it'd be interesting to share with you (lucky you!). Gamma.app is an AI presentation generator. It "rapidly creating professional presentations, documents, websites, and social media content from simple text prompts."

Try it at this link here: https://gamma.app/​

Same thing as before if you have a pdf or a text you can upload it, or you can write a prompt directly into the website to come up with a set of "cards" that are sort of like slides. It's definitely more-so focused on the visual aspect of things, but this is cool in the sense that you can choose to publish it to a website. Here is a link to a quick one I made for facebook ad's and golf instructors for example: https://golfads-6npxtne.gamma.site/​

Literally it took me just the time to write the prompt. Now imagine that you need some visual cues to remember for an exam, think how helpful that is to help with word-photo association.

Moreover - extra points to Gamma.app because it shows you how it's being generated, wheras notebookLM is sort of a black box and just has you waiting for the output, or even refreshing the page sometimes. Also, gamma is great because you can make edits to the visual outputs, like change the structure of a slide, change color schema, have a chatbot that you can help make quick edits with as well.

A couple of Classics

Of course the heavy hitters are still around...

Notion is a good substitute to something like microsoft task manager, and to be honest I probably didn't use it for half of it's capabilities. I think a lot of their team is made up of founders so they're always coming out with cool new features and have integrations with some big names in AI as well (maybe even have an llm themselves?).

Promodoro is strikingly simple; https://pomofocus.io/. It's just a timer, but something about it makes me want to study and knock off my to do lists knowing the "focus" time is fleeting.

Anki is a flashcard system my friend swears by. Not sexy, just simple and if you stay up on the content you'll build a great set of terms, new words that you're looking to study etc.
​
But still... I felt like there was a gap when I'd review and read through slides when studying. In our current era there are overflowing amount of options to create something customized, so I did. Think Kahoot's competitive nature multiplied by the old phone game "Trivia Crack's" gamified feeling, add in Duolingo's roadmap progression feature and their stickiness of their app and you have loop: a social learning platform that uses challenges, rankings, and real-time feedback to make studying addictive.

But let's take a step back.

How did I build this thing?

Well it's super easy actually, with this other tool called Lovable. Lovable has been called fastest growing startup of all time reaching $100M ARR in under a year, and rightfully so. It's a no code AI app builder that doesn't just use Natural Language Processing, but has a backend that can build tables using SQL for data storage, and can push websites into production with lovable domains. Link here​

So long story short, I've had this idea for a few months and made it happen, and kept up with the progress in another section of this blog called side projects find them here.

Here's a snippet from my progress back in Nov. of '25;

So the idea is simple, student's have all these tools, but still study from ppts because the exams are so similar to them, word for word questions etc. Loop connects professors with students, in that a professor could "create" a class, and drop in their appropriate power points into an AI engine and generate a roadmap.

When a student signs up, they're given options for different universities based off their domain from their email, and then can select their cohort within those universities. From there, the student's have options to select classes that are predefined within their degree.

Now, within Loop there's different "stages" of learning, whether that's week 1 or what have you, but just like Duolingo you need to pass each level to get to the next, make progress, it totally gamifies studying. Points, challenges, community mode, leaderboards with your classmates, notifications, all of the things that you'd look for in an app.

I don't know where it's headed

But I didn't think this is what it'd turn into, so I'll keep pursuing it as a passion project. I just see the competitive nature from Kahoot and wonder, why can't you replicate that?

Loop! Also, open to workshopping the name, send me some ideas.

Thanks for reading until the end, take a look here at the latest version: Loop​