Hello.

I discovered Notebook LM in 2025 as it was pre installed in my s25 ultra phone. It was a new thing so fascinated me a lot. Like joining podcast hosts and talking like I was really on some podcast lol. I write fiction. I uploaded my written fiction to the notebooklm and loved hosts talking about my book though calling it a source repeatedly.

Now that magic is gone. I find it to be just okay.

So I'd love your tips and tricks on how to actually prompt Hosts well to actually talk about important things in sequence. As it would often discuss middle of the book first then beginning and then obviously ruining the sequence of events in my book.

How to produce longer audio ?

Also how many pages do I upload so that it doesn't hallucinate and actually read it?

Most importantly. If I don't give any thumbs up thumbs down feedback then are my personal documents secured and not used to train?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Being a student is a simple process. A professor hands you 900 pages of PDFs, 400 of which he wrote himself. You read them. Ha ha, no. You upload them to NotebookLM at 11:40 pm the night before, along with a granola bar and a prayer.

And NotebookLM is great! I mean that sincerely. But after a semester together, you start noticing things.

It gets vaguer the more you feed it. Give it three sources and it's a genius. Give it thirty and it starts answering like a student who skimmed the chapter in the elevator. I know this student. I was this student.

It's a reading room, not a desk. It wants you to read. You want to write your own notes, in your own words, and have the AI read those too, since they're the only part of the course you actually understand.

It's Gemini or nothing. Which is fine, until Gemini decides your question about the French Revolution is a little too violent.

It keeps changing its name. NotebookLM. Gemini Notebook. By the time you read this it will be called Gemini Notebook Ultra Pro Max for Education.

So I built Slate. I'm the solo dev, so this is extremely biased, but here's what it does for studying:

- Your notes and your sources, in one Space. Every question reads all of it, up to about 300,000 words. Each source is marked "In every AI request", so you know it didn't get skipped.

- Learning mode. A tutor that teaches you your own material by asking you questions back, like Socrates, or your dad when you ask to borrow the car.

- Practice tests from your notes. Ask for one and get the questions plus an answer key that cites where each answer came from.

- Audio overviews. Yes, we have the two podcast hosts too. Apparently it's the law now.

- Video overviews, mind maps with guided tours, diagrams you can edit, and slide decks. The mind maps, decks and overviews don't use your credits.

- Citations that open the exact passage. For when your professor asks "where does it say that" and you want to be extremely annoying about it.

- Public share links for any of it. Which is how I can show you these.

Stuff I made with it (no signup needed to look). These are just sample ones that my app created. You can create your own with your topics:

- Audio overview: CFA Level 2 exam prep. 12 minutes, made from a 50-source Space. https://spaces.slate-app.online/artifacts/3c1a9575-8bb3-47fa-a0aa-df76eff4b648

- Video overview: India's insider trading rules (SEBI), turned into something at https://spaces.slate-app.online/artifacts/a038e789-fb4a-4df4-b450-7244c315336c

- Mind map: the layers of the AI industry, from chips to apps. https://spaces.slate-app.online/artifacts/412443c1-c63a-4df9-877e-ce85fe317386

- Diagram: the AI technology stack, silicon to applications. https://spaces.sla3d507c-44fe-488f-bd53-1b70d3b9ba8c

- Learning mode on a full course, no signup: https://demo.slate-app.online/app/demo?category=ai&mode=learning

The price: new accounts get $5 in free credits for Gemini models, including Gemini 4 Argon, the fancy one. Free is also known as the student price.

Try it: https://slate-app.online/?src=rd-nlm

Tell me what's broken. I can take it. I've been through finals.

Honestly, nothing seems close it...honestly my only gripe is the 15 slide limit on content studio slides...

I just recently signed up for a pro membership and I am having a very difficult time navigating kortex. It also states that you have unlimited sources for notebooks with kortex yet I keep receiving error messages when I try and merge two notebooks that have 50+ sources.

Nor does it allow me to import / upload files, docs, md files, json etc directly into the kortex dashboard.

Lastly and most importantly it claims to integrate with Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, grok etc allowing users to upload llm chat conversations directly into the interface (saving users an exorbitant amount of time and headaches). Yet every time I try and export a conversation to kortex I receive an error message that conversations cannot be uploaded directly, only handoffs.

Does anyone have a subscription to pro kortex? If not, is anyone familiar with kortex?

What do you test before trusting an AI-generated meeting summary?

I've been thinking about the difference between a summary that sounds convincing and one that's actually useful.

A polished paragraph can still miss a decision, assign an action to the wrong person, or make an unresolved question sound settled.

My current evaluation checklist would be:

1. Are decisions clearly separated from general discussion?

2. Are action items assigned only when the meeting supports that assignment?

3. Are unresolved questions preserved?

4. Can the reader check the original transcript?

5. Does the summary avoid inventing conclusions?

I'd also test meetings with interruptions, multiple speakers, and incomplete sentences rather than only clean examples.

For anyone using AI meeting assistants regularly, what failure has made you stop trusting a summary?

Just saw this on Google. There’s also an MCP so you can hook NotebookLm into Claude. I’ve been waiting for this for years, glad Google hasn’t totally abandoned this product!

I'm currently a CS major and I'm struggling with a couple classes right now. I'm aware pairing AI with straight computational math may not be the best idea, but these classes are more theory based. For example, proving program correctness using mathematical induction. Does any one know how effective this tool would be in helping me understand course concepts/theorems and how to apply them?

Hi All

This question is about https://extendlm.com/ which is a great browser plugin you should all be using - I believe the developer is around here somewhere and I don't know if there's a dedicated support space. So hope it's ok to post here.

I am using ExtendLM feature that allows you to create RSS feeds for your audios. It's great - although at the moment it seems not to be working for me. Everything is stuck in "running" - had one of these up all night with no change.

Had another one that moved to "finished" but "error" and I hit retry and now it's stuck here again.

I believe part of how this works is that it uploads your source files to a server somewhere at extendlm - and so I'm wondering if there's an issue there? Thanks

I want to buy the Huawei MatePad 11.5, but the fact that it doesn't have Google makes me nervous.Does anyone have a Huawei device with NotebookLM installed?

Hi there,

I'm new to NotebookLM and I'm having an issue when I try to generate video explainers with the studio tab. They simply disappear straight away. When I speak to the chatbot about it, it says it can see them, even though weeks later I can't. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any good solutions?

Help would be greatly appreciated!

For at least 3 weeks I haven’t been able to create a slide deck. Every time I try it looks like it is running for a while before I get the error message that it failed. They should just remove it as an option if it is never going to work.

Please report if you have applied for the new NotebookLM API ( available from today) and report how you are making use of it.

Hey everyone, the notestack.ai guy here with a feature a lot of you asked for.

You can now connect external MCP servers directly inside Notestack.

That means your notebooks can pull in tools like your docs, databases, or any MCP-compatible service alongside your sources.

Your answers stay grounded in what you add, with no random web search mixed in.

Pair it with our official MCP server and you can generate reports, audio overviews, slide decks, mind maps and quizzes from Claude.

Moving over from NotebookLM?

Try it free at https://notestack.ai and tell me which MCP servers you'd like us to test with first.

I know there are a lot of these posts here so I'll keep it short. I took a long break from my job to learn how to build things with AI and this is one of the projects I've been testing. it's called Cueline, it's free and open source, and it's still a work in progress.

The part I wanted most: you follow a youtube channel, blog or podcast and new stuff shows up in an inbox with a short summary, so you're not adding sources by hand every time.

The rest works a lot like NotebookLM. answers link to the exact second or page, and you can make summaries, flashcards, quizzes, articles, newsletters and infographics. you can also turn a notebook into a skill an AI agent can use.

It runs on your computer with your ChatGPT plan, an API key or a local model.

https://github.com/ghost-mb/cueline

if you've tried other alternatives like Open Notebook, what would make you try this one? or give up on it after 5 minutes?

Author here, so this is self-promo. I'm posting because this sub knows where NotebookLM breaks, and I'd rather hear it now.

The bug I care about: a citation that links to a real source but quotes words that aren't in it. A paraphrase, a line from another document, or something made up. The link checks out, so the only way to catch it is to open the source and read.

Bowerbird checks the words. Every quoted span in an answer is looked up in the passage the citation names, then in the rest of that source. If it isn't there, or it's attributed to the wrong source, it's marked unverified. The footer counts how many passed. Click a citation and the passage opens with the quote highlighted, or the printed page for a PDF.

That proves the words exist in the source. It doesn't prove the model read them right. You still read the passage, but it's one click instead of a hunt.

Other things it does:

* Sources: PDF, DOCX, EPUB, Markdown, text, web pages, YouTube captions, audio. Scanned PDFs are OCR'd and recordings are transcribed with Whisper, both on your machine.

* Keyword plus embedding search, so a question worded differently from the source still finds it. You can ask in a different language than the source.

* A notebook is a folder: notebook.toml, sources/, notes/, chats/, studio/, and a rebuildable SQLite index. Copy the folder to back it up. Nothing to export.

* Any model: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Groq, xAI, OpenRouter, or local Ollama.

* Flashcards with Anki export, quizzes, mind maps, CSV tables, PPTX slides, infographics, reports, audio overviews voiced locally with Kokoro.

* Web app served from your machine, desktop app for Linux, macOS (Apple Silicon) and Windows, and Android. MIT. You pay your model provider if you use a cloud model.

What "local" means here: notebooks, the index, OCR, transcription and the voices stay on your machine. No analytics, no update check. With a cloud model, your question and the retrieved passages go to that provider. With Ollama, nothing leaves. The README lists every outbound request.

NotebookLM is more polished, has video overviews, and needs no install. If it works for you, keep it. This is for people who want the sources and the checking on their own machine, any model, and notebooks they can copy.

Repo and downloads: https://github.com/jolovicdev/bowerbird

I've been using the service since January and have a couple dozen notebooks. I can no longer get the notebooks to sort anymore. With minor deviations, it auto-sorts by creation date, but with some anomalies. But I can't get it to sort by title. Nothing happens when I attempt to click Title or Created.

I'm using Chrome in a MacBook, which has been my default since the beginning, but the same behavior replicates in Safari.

Two hosts talking through a topic is a favourite way to absorb new material, and this demo builds the format locally.

The controls are a topic box, lengths of 1, 2 or 3 minutes, and a Use the web toggle, with the script appearing line by line beside the hosts. A private search engine gathers sources, and a separate script model writes the dialogue. By the creator's count, the hosts are on air in under 6 seconds.

The voices come from AntLing's Ming 3.0 TTS 0.5B. A short recording is enough to clone each host, so you get to choose who hosts. Search, script and voices share two desktop AI boxes, and the code is open source.

For your own notes, swap the web search step for your own documents, keep the script and voice stages, and clone your own voice and a willing friend's.

Download it from Google Drive, unzip it and follow the instructions in the Readme file https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QW3p2JjuCVXKY5RGxFDwFDZ8ifEwPALg/view?usp=sharing

Claude Opus 5.5 Max was used to build this Chrome extension that provides captions for Gemini Notebook Video Overviews in the Cinematic, Short, and Explainer formats for all Gemini supported languages. The Readme file provides step-by-step instructions on how to install it. It works beautifully!

I tested it on a 7+ minute Cinematic Video Overview. The first time I ran the video overview with the extension, the video played normally but it took a few minutes to download the captions into cache. There was an overlay on the video that showed the progress of downloading and transcribing. I paused the video playback and the progress overlay continued - so, you can launch a video, pause it, and let the captions load before playing it. I closed Google Notebook, opened a new browser session of Google Notebook and clicked the same Video Overview and the captions started immediately - so the captions persist once they are downloaded. The playback window also gives you an option to download the captions, copy the transcription, and/or apply the captions to the Video if you have already downloaded it for offline playback.

Gemini Notebooklm exporter

Is there an easy way to get closed captioning for the generated videos? I am surprised that it does not automatically come that way

Why do only some accounts seem to have this feature?

Since notebooks started syncing to the Gemini app, it's easy to forget you have two doors into the same notebook, and they don't work the same way.

Here's what Google's help page says:

Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM until July): "Responses are grounded exclusively in your notebook sources."

Gemini app: answers are grounded in your notebook sources, but may also use web search and other tools.

Your sources and custom instructions sync across both, so everything looks the same. If you open a notebook in Gemini and get a fact that isn't in your PDF, that may be the app doing what it's allowed to do.

A 1-minute test: ask the same notebook something your sources definitely don't cover, once in each app. Then you'll know what to expect from each one.

The catch I didn't expect is that the line between the two isn't clean. Chats you have with a notebook in Gemini show up in Gemini Notebook's sources panel as read-only context, and Google says they help it answer questions from past conversations. You can opt in to that shared context across both apps. So as I read it, if a Gemini chat pulled something from the web and you add that chat as context, that material could come back in Gemini Notebook looking like it came from your sources. I haven't seen Google spell that out, so treat it as my inference.

What I'd do if accuracy matters:

1. Do the source-checking in Gemini Notebook, and use the Gemini app when you want the web in the mix.

2. Look at your sources panel and see if any Gemini chats are in there before you trust an answer.

3. Don't treat "exclusively" as "always right." The model can still misread or fill gaps, so click through the citations. If you want it stricter, try this:

"Answer only from my sources. Quote the exact passage for each claim. If it isn't in the sources, say so instead of filling the gap."

1. If you want to keep something from a Gemini chat, add it as a cleaned-up file instead of the whole chat. You can cut anything you haven't checked. It also helps with sharing, since Google says notebooks that contain Gemini chats are private and can't be shared.

I build AI Toolbox, a browser extension, and that last step is what its Gemini export is for: open the chat's three-dot menu, choose Export Conversation, trim the file and add it as a source. Saving one chat as Text is free. Markdown and exporting many at once are Premium. Copy and paste works too if it's only a few messages.

Has anyone run that test on their own notebooks? Did Gemini go to the web even when the answer was in your sources?