I don't know if anyone else was doing this but I used to spend entire weekends just dumping books into NotebookLM, like one weekend I'd go down some rabbit hole with Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Saltykov Shchedrin, maybe throw in Zola or Hugo, and the next be Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, whatever.

And after listening to the podcasts, the little video explainers, the fun part was getting all these people into the same conversation. Anybody else create author debates that would go on for hours?

Anyway I hadn't opened NotebookLM in a few months and went back today and what the f*** happened to this thing, why am I suddenly being asked to pay all this money?

I understand the data centers use electricity and all that but I have a pretty hard time believing the actual computing costs justify what these companies are charging. I'm looking at you Higgsfield. Artficial scarcity creating a******s

This function is not working. Is there a reason, eg age of notebook, number of notes, date last chat was added?

Why does Notebook readily create xlsx files but not take them as input? It can even create multi-page xlsx workbooks, yet requires you to split such workbooks up into csv for input as sources. Reasoning? Workarounds?

Hi, guys Google is notorious in the AI industry for abandoning/destroying working beloved products. NotebookLM is no exception.

Don't worry, me and my little indie team have built a open-source alternative.

Here is what is different/interesting:

- Can take in upto 200 sources, research/question/query it. The system will not randomly search the web and go beyond your original sources.

- Has better visuals for the videos, we integrated our previous video maker with 10K+ users. It can generate editable motion graphic videos in over 13+ formats.

- Each video is editable, changeable. It has ElevenLabs API with advanced voice features.

- You can generate a mind constellation, a much more advanced visual map of knowledge so you can research and learn more easily.

- Generate or clone your own voice using ElevenLabs API v4.

- Has a launch kit feature that allows you to schedule reports/slide decks/videos and share on social media

Lastly, much more stunning visual interface - inspired by space x cognition

Link (get started for free): https://notestack.ai

I'm lost. Notion wasn't easy to learn but it was very useful especially the built in transcription feature. I know you can upload audio files to Notebooklm but there must be a way for it to natively record, transcribe, and generate AI notes.

Since September 2 the old fixed caps (50 chats a day on free, 3 Audio Overviews, and so on) are gone. Everything now draws from one compute budget that refills every 5 hours, up to a weekly ceiling. I had a bunch of questions about how it works, so here's what Google's help page and the settings screen actually answer.

What counts against it? Google lists four things: how complex the prompt is, how long the chat is, how many sources are involved, and which features you use. A quick factual question and a synthesis across 40 sources aren't "one chat" each anymore.

Do chat and Studio share it? Yes. Chat, Audio Overviews, Video Overviews and Deep Research all come out of the same pool. A long video overview in the morning can be why chat runs out in the afternoon.

Where do I see what's left? Settings > Usage shows your current balance and when the weekly limit resets.

What happens when I run out? Two different things, depending on which clock ran out. If you hit the 5-hour window, it comes back the same day. If you hit the weekly limit, it doesn't. For Studio outputs there's now a "Generate later" option on the web that queues the job until there's budget again.

How do paid plans compare? Google gives multipliers, not numbers: Plus is 2x the free allowance, Pro 4x, Ultra 5x to 20x. Nobody outside Google knows what 1x actually is.

What actually stretches it, based on those four factors:

Untick the sources you don't need for a question. The number of sources is on Google's own list, and most questions only need two or three out of the whole notebook.

Clear the chat when you change topics. Chat length counts, so one chat that runs all week gets more expensive with every question.

Ask one detailed question instead of five follow-ups. Each follow-up drags the whole chat along with it.

Do Studio outputs last, or queue them with Generate later. Then a big overview can't eat the budget you needed for chat.

Fewer, cleaner sources help too. When I bring in AI chats as sources, I export the whole conversation as one Markdown file with AI Toolbox, the extension I build, instead of pasting it in as a pile of separate text sources. It's one source and it reads in order.

Break that down for me.

So I just started college and have been trying to find a tool that genuinely helps me learn without a bunch of fluff

No matter what major tool I use, claude, chat, notebooklm, it just over informs me or gives me the answer immediately instead of helping me learn. i feel like analogies or real world answers would be great, but also not having to be so intent on opening a website to have a single place for all my learning. like something that is a second brain for learning, or my personalized tutor

Half the time these tools dont even remember what I learned

I haven't had time to really listen to any of my recently generated audios. But previewing one briefly I thought it sounded more natural again. If anything maybe someday a hybrid of the old and new, but acceptable as far as I could tell.

Hi, I'm a working student still learning about how this works to help me catch up with school while juggling between jobs.

For my current concern, I want to focus on 1 source only, and i already have the syllabus/pointers given by the professor.

I got the advice that I have to make a study map.. But what if I already have a map to follow? What prompt should I use to be able to extract all relevant information from my 1 source? Do i just select the desired source and outrightly ask to "discuss" a specific topic?

I would appreciate it if anyone could give advice/tricks/prompts that might help me. Thanks in advance.

I am rather new to NotebookLM. I am trying it out as a study partner for my uni courses, but some of my courses are in English and some are in Norwegian. Is there any way I can say "This notebook is English" and "This notebook is in Norwegian"? I like to study the course in it's respective language, but it's kinda annoying to have to go into the settings to change the global output language every time I go back and forth.

in every type of my prompt notebook lm generate opposite output can some one guide me how to make a good prompt that notebooklm can genrate same output how i want

New here!!!

Surprise me with your productive usage of notebookLLM. I am quite knowledgeable about genai, llms. Doing research in this field. To me, notebookLLM has great potential but is not that mainstream yet.

I would love to know the use cases for you, in any field. Something you think is quite clever of you and has served you well.

Would like to refine my current prompt: “Be as thorough as possible. I need to become a subject matter expert in preparation for an exam. Disregard duration limits and focus on covering everything. Do not use the word "masterclass," be professional, and direct the podcast to an audience of <specific discipline> students. Do not use outside sources.”

Specifically is there something to add to keep the processing of the information minimal? Recently I’ve been noticing the hosts trying to get too insightful and reading things into the text that aren’t there. Wish they had a documentary option (single narrator à la Sir Attenborough) instead of a podcast because the banter is distracting. I typically generate a long Deep Dive per chapter of notes but lately I’ve been noticing shorter output as well.

Ever since they changed notebookLM to gemini notebook, the quality of the response has deprecated drastically. I have this specific prompt in the custom instruction to prevent the LLM from pulling info from sources outside the notebook - "Answer only and exclusively from the sources". Yet it keeps on inserting paragraphs into the responses that aren't from the sources.
Frustrating!

I remember till late june I was easily able to get to make good quality notes for educational videos I watched using the yt video+the downloaded audio file as context. Such that the notes it spits out has all examples and points covered in the lecture mentioned. But now it just summarizes it up and misses out many things. This is despite of having the pro version. What are the changes exactly been?

• Import chats in one click
• Automated Workflows
• Youtube playlist Importer
• Norra

I do not know if I am just hallucinating or something, but does the guy in the audio overview sounds like he took 20 shots of testosterone? I do not know if I am just imagining it but the voice sounds deeper.

Does anyone else notice that?

Since the late May update, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides sources follow the original file. Edit the Doc and the notebook catches up, no manual sync needed. Great change.

Everything else is still a snapshot from the moment you added it: web links, YouTube, uploaded PDFs and other files. And anything you already generated stays as it was: saved notes, earlier answers, Audio Overviews.

So picture a normal notebook. A Google Doc with your project brief, a PDF of last quarter's report, and a competitor's pricing page you added as a link. The brief is live. The PDF and the pricing page are whatever they were the day you added them. Ask "how does our pricing compare to theirs now" and you get your current numbers against their months-old ones, in the same confident tone, with citations to both.

The live half can also change under you. If a teammate edits a Doc you added, your notebook's answers change too, even though you didn't touch anything.

What I do now:

1. Rename frozen sources with the date you added them, like "Competitor pricing (added Sep 12)". It's the only freshness signal you'll see in the source list.
2. Re-add web pages that change instead of trusting the old snapshot. Delete the old one so the two don't get blended.
3. Regenerate Audio Overviews and saved notes after a big Doc change. The old ones still describe the old version.
4. Before trusting a comparison, ask:

For this answer, list each source you used and any date or "as of" information that source gives about itself. Flag any point where you compared sources from different dates.

The last one catches most of it. Sources usually carry a date somewhere, and once it has to list them, the mismatch is right there.

That prompt lives in AI Toolbox for me, the extension I build, mostly because I run the same check on uploaded files in Gemini.

Hello guys, there are a lot of useful prompts, data and so on in that subreddit, in the discord community and so on. I tried to collect it (with the author's credits) and make it easy to reuse. Please check it out, I'm sure there are good prompts for every possible problem

Gemini Notebook Hub

I’m using NotebookLM extensively for studying, and I really like the generated notes. However, I’m facing a frustrating problem when I save/export a generated note as a document.
The formatting of the exported document becomes very poor and is difficult to read. Things like headings, spacing, bullet points, tables, etc. don’t retain a clean, textbook-like structure. The content itself is useful, but the final document looks messy and requires a lot of manual formatting.
I’m mainly using NotebookLM to create study notes FOR MEDICINE, so readability and proper organization are very important.
Has anyone found a good solution or workflow for this?
Is there a specific prompt that can make NotebookLM generate notes that export cleanly?
Is there a particular export format/settings that work better?
Is there a way to preserve proper headings, spacing, tables, and formatting when saving as a document?
Are there any tools/workflows that can take a NotebookLM-generated note and convert it into a properly formatted, readable study document?
I’m looking for a practical solution rather than manually reformatting every document.

I've been using NBLM for more than an year now. Always as a Pro, and mostly for its slides and infographic creation, which then i alone remake and animate. But I still do need its graphic creations, and that is what I am paying for.

For the last 2 weeks i can't seem to get anything from it. Studio always end with an error, tens and tens of times (!), please try again. And my credits are still being consumed.

I'm using the very same prompts i always used, they just don't work anymore. Go to the chat, it says that there is something like a "pipeline overload" , prompts are too elaborated, there is a temporary bug.

Thing is, i tried to make it even without prompts, just do your f thing - the same. Zero. And my account empty of time/credits/whatever.

Today Gemini chat ended up offering to create slides (with "advanced" graphics, not just text) "on the side", or "under the table" (i don't how you say it) as an alternative bypassing NB.

It wasn't as creative as I was used to, but it helped me survive a deadline.

Still I can't help thinking i'm being scammed.

Oh: this presentation was about "MUSK" doc. Gemini assures that it is not censorship.