r/notebooklm Oct 30 '25

Announcement Chat in NotebookLM: A powerful, goal-focused AI research partner

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58 Upvotes

r/notebooklm 5h ago

Question Alternative to notebook LM

22 Upvotes

Is there an alternative to NotebookLM? I really like its quiz-generation feature, but I wish it could include photos in the questions. Is there another AI platform that can generate quizzes with images? I think this would be especially helpful for studying anatomy.


r/notebooklm 23h ago

Discussion I'm very concerned about number of files impacting token usage in the upcoming September update

53 Upvotes

I suppose this was always going to happen. NotebookLM was a loss-leader to build the user base up and screw us when the time was right.

Unless I don't understand something, the whole point of NBLM is to be an efficient consumer of files. I could feed it 15 books, and it shouldn't have to re-read the book + previous conversations after every single prompt. Isn't that the whole point of RAG?

Is the implementaion of Gemini editing the technology? Why would number of files impact the token usage given NBLM would not have re-read and re-send every book/pdf after every singe prompt?

This tool was a much better way to learn than spamming LLMs for answers. We could engage with our notes, books and pdfs in a better, more efficient manner. I do not have to read ten world war II books to write an urgent essay about idk, Operation Fortitude or the London Zoo Blitz Evacuation. I still learn, take notes, and write essays but with so much more focus. Instead of reading a book back to front, or wasting time in turning pages to find the paragraph/chapter, I can access the information, use it without rotting my brain!


r/notebooklm 5h ago

Question Anybody here in PA School? Is there any prompts that you are using to make flashcards for anki or a quizlet? Im new to AI and having it run though lecture slides and generate questions, flashcards and summaries to study.

1 Upvotes

I just started PA school and discovered about Notebook. I was shown on how to do Chat GPT, I have google Plus because I needed to increase my storage for my photos. I already pay for it so I figured Id use Notebook to start making guides.

Was wondering if anyone had specific prompts or hacks they could share with me as I really am new to all of this


r/notebooklm 13h ago

Bug Sources vanish over night

3 Upvotes

As the title says: I had a notebook with about 20 sources, mostly links to articles. None of the sources showed any errors and when answering the first questions, NotebookLM used all those sources.

The next day suddenly only 12 sources remained and the day after that only 8 remain.

Do you have similar issues? Is there a fix?

Edit: 50 minutes after posting this, the notebook is down to 6 sources.


r/notebooklm 12h ago

Discussion Videos / Images are still rubbish at this point in time.

3 Upvotes

My three handed, handy friend


r/notebooklm 12h ago

Question Why does google keep ching their UI so regularly?

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2 Upvotes

I use notebookLM in the browser on mobile. It used to work perfectly yesterday. But today it looks like this. It creates a smaller popup instead of a fullscreen one, making it less readable and cutting text off.

This isn't the first time it happened. I constantly notice small UI changes in YouTube as well, without actually changing anything about the UI itself. So these small changes seem really useless and like mistakes.

Does anybody know why this constantly happens with a tech-giant like Google? They should have the recourses to check everything before releasing anything, right?


r/notebooklm 1d ago

Discussion Why does Google need to ruin everything?

325 Upvotes

LM Notebook was possibly the best free AI tool in existence and they also had to ruin that.

I'm currently using it for a very important research project and I need to make sure that it relies on the sources I uploaded. I always read my material before uploading and today it started giving me some really fictional answers and I noticed not all the information was source-based but integrated with information it probably randomly found on the internet...

Can't they make like a turn-off option for this integrated Gemini thing, it's pissing me off.

P.S. does anyone know of another AI tool that works like Notebook but that only relies on the sources you provide?


r/notebooklm 21h ago

Discussion Gemini Notebook | Your research and thinking partner, grounded in the information you trust

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0 Upvotes

r/notebooklm 15h ago

Bug I HATE NOTEBOOKLM

0 Upvotes

Im a new NotebookLM user

I was working on a note for ~30 minutes, literally pouring my soul into it, I saved the file and refreshed the page, ALL MY WORK WAS GONE

is there autosave by any chance? pls tell me there is a way to recover that note

Im not sure what had happened


r/notebooklm 1d ago

Bug My assignment is officially cooked ๐Ÿ’€

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20 Upvotes

Opened my notes and this is what I got ๐Ÿ’€

At this point, Iโ€™m not studyingโ€ฆ Iโ€™m just staring at the screen. ๐Ÿ˜ญ


r/notebooklm 1d ago

Question Some better academic purpose alternative

7 Upvotes

I have been thinking if there is something better than nlm for generating quizzes making flashcards and helping with notes? Nlm is not bad but is there something better?


r/notebooklm 1d ago

Question [Enterprise] "Discover sources" โ†’ Add fails 100% of the time since ~Aug 31 (INVALID_ARGUMENT). Anyone else?

1 Upvotes

Running NotebookLM Enterprise (the vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com flavor).

Since around Aug 31, Discover sources search works fine, but clicking Add on

any discovered source fails every single time โ€” the add RPC (kqBlec) comes

back with error code 3 (INVALID_ARGUMENT) and nothing gets added to the

notebook.

This hit us in the middle of a customer rollout and we had to roll back on

launch day. The customer assumed it was our integration, so we captured HAR

traces to prove otherwise โ€” it reproduces identically with and without our

infrastructure in the path:

- 4/4 failures across 2 days, 3 different notebooks, 1-10 sources,

including a brand-new empty notebook

- Direct internet connection, no proxy โ€” same error

- Everything else in the same session works (search, polling, chat),

only the discovered-source add is broken

- Frontend build boq_cloud-ml-notebooklm-ui_20260823.08 โ€” suspecting a

regression from the Aug 23 deploy

Filed a bug: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/555304818

Honestly, this one's been rough โ€” we've been building a feature around this,

got chewed out by the customer for something that turned out not to be ours,

and spent days proving it. If you've seen anything similar, or know anything

about what's going on, a comment would mean a lot. And if you can repro,

a star on the issue would help everyone affected.


r/notebooklm 20h ago

Question Help ?

0 Upvotes

Hi everyone, as a student not being able to afford a subscription, anyone would be able to help me with my thesis using their account ? Iโ€™m not asking for yours but if I could send you infos could you please use your account for me ? Thank you so much


r/notebooklm 1d ago

Discussion Anyone using Notebooklm for content creation?

7 Upvotes

Is there anyone who uses Notebooklm videos/ audios for content creation? I have seen some youtube channels do this. What is the reason you Notebooklm or donโ€™t want to use it?


r/notebooklm 2d ago

Discussion Anyone else getting this banner notice in any notebook they open?

11 Upvotes

Just started about 30 mins ago.


r/notebooklm 2d ago

Question How do you include your own notes as sources into Notebook?

3 Upvotes
  1. I use Flexcil for reading an anotation. Flexcil is synchronized to Drive so the files get update on Drive.
  2. I add or update the files on a Notebook manually from Drive, there is no authomatic synchronization as far as I know. So Drive is a backup and a bridge.
  3. Any generated content withinin Notebook, I have to export it to PDF locally and go through points 1 and 2. If I just convert them as new sources in Notebook they don't get to Flexcil in any way.

So the workflow is always Flexcil -> Drive -> Notebook -> local file -> Flexcil and start the cycle again. It's the only way it works for me so far if I want Notebook to read (for example) my handwritten notes.

Am I overcomplicating things? How do you do it?


r/notebooklm 3d ago

Question new user of gemini notebook here - the conversations about it getting dumber are not helping!

46 Upvotes

I use it to help me get through reading papers, generating practice questions and quizzes in my physics degree.

Has NotebookLM/Gemini Notebook really gotten "dumber" over the past few months? One of the principal reasons of getting the Pro Plan was to use notebookLM to reduce hallucinations (to near zero) and make learning more efficient.

Is this the opinion of a loud few, or the overwhelming opinion of veterans of this service?

The new changes to the limits are not helping either, very disappoiting to see the number of resources affecting the overall limit. Isn't that the whole point of NotebookLM over ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini? That we don't have to worry about using up all tokens in 2 messages when vast number of resources are used?


r/notebooklm 2d ago

Discussion Solve problems

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0 Upvotes

Last year, the same message appeared, and Notebooklm was experiencing several problems. After a few days, the tool became better and more suitable in terms of results. I hope this resolves all user-related issues.


r/notebooklm 3d ago

Bug Facing issues

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11 Upvotes

Happened thrice in a row, i can't get any response


r/notebooklm 2d ago

Question How good is notebookLM for non english video content?

0 Upvotes

hi I have some source to research that is made in Bangla language. Is NotebookLM capable to handle Bangla video content?


r/notebooklm 3d ago

Discussion Solve problems in notebooklm

18 Upvotes

Most of us encounter problems with the Gemni Notebook, and I have a suggestion: write down all the issues we face in the notebook and copy them to x.com, tagging the Gemni Notebook account so they know what we're experiencing. If many people do this, there will be solutions to these problems. Let's go, everyone!


r/notebooklm 4d ago

Discussion This absolutely SUCKS

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340 Upvotes

What was once an AI darling is nerfed into the ground completely.


r/notebooklm 4d ago

Question is gemini notebook actually worse now or am i doing something wrong?

86 Upvotes

I used notebooklm all of last year for university and it was amazing. I just came back from summer holiday and used it first time again yesterday, but the answers feel different. It used to be much more thorough. Now when i put on a lot of sources it writes really bad. Maybe they changed the settings or something?

The responses feel way more surface-level, it misses key parts of my pdfs. Also, i saw people talking about the audio overview being shorter??

Is anyone else's workflow completely messed up after the update? Is there anything we can do about it?s

The thing is, ive been testing the open source desktop app i made, https://canvasdownloader.app/ (free for all students using Canvas LMS) that is supposed to make ai-assisted learning easy by converting their course files automatically so they're drag and drop ready for notebookLM. The drag and drop is flawless and worked both before and after googled switch to Gemini Notebook, with direct succesfull import of 200+ file courses, but NotebookLM has dropped in its answer quality. It seems like its NotebookLM that changed..?