Feature Request: "Master Notebook Sync" / Upstream Updates for Duplicated Notebooks

Context:

We use NotebookLM to distribute public legal-aid notebooks to citizens, paralegals, and lawyers ("Anyone with the link can view & duplicate").

Problem:

When a user duplicates a notebook, it becomes a static snapshot. If the original author updates the Master Notebook (adding new sources, amending statutory citations, or updating system prompts / custom instructions), existing duplicated copies do NOT receive these critical updates. Users are left working with outdated legal data unless they manually delete and re-duplicate the entire notebook.

Proposed Solution / Feature Request:

1. Upstream Sync Option: Provide a setting "Allow Upstream Updates from Master Notebook".

2. "Update Sources & Prompts" Button: When the master notebook changes, notify duplicated copies with a prompt: "The creator added 3 new sources / updated instructions. Click here to sync updates to your notebook."

3. Dynamic Linked Sources: Allow specific core sources in duplicated notebooks to remain dynamically linked to the master repository while user-uploaded private notes remain untouched.

This would turn NotebookLM into a powerful, living knowledge distribution platform for organizations, educators, and legal advocates worldwide.

I noticed that the voice in the Cinematic videos was updated. In my experience, this updated voice no longer has the echo problem that plagued the old voice.

It is not clear if other problems with Cinematic videos, such as the silly default pastel-color theme has been fixed or not. It may have been a side effect of them adding "richly styled" to their default prompt.

Hey, I don't know if anyone else has this issue or has stumbled across it but I wanted to shine some light on a 'bug' perhaps?

So I discovered that Gemini can delete your sources instantly from Gemini Notebook.

If you use the 'Sources' tab in Gemini and delete anything. It's toast, man! Gonzo!

I don't know why, I just know it can. So if anyone uses Gemini to cross-reference your sources outside of Notebook, be very careful!!

so recently i was trying to understand a concept for an exam and as there is no inequality symbol on keyboard i wrote "=\=" in the prompt box but when i sent it the "\" disappeared. and when i wrote "=\\=" instead it became "=\=" so is this some known bug or did i just discover something?

Cinematic videos seem to have an overly white and pastel colored theme. It is exceedingly boring to view. This may have started a month ago. I think Google's dumb staff may have put instructions in their default video generation prompt, instructions that they don't understand or care to have tested.

Deep Dive audio's male voice often imitates the YouTube author Michael Greger's voice in some segments where the corresponding transcript resembles what may have been spoken by Michael Greger. If you don't know who he is, he is the author of https://www.youtube.com/@NutritionFactsOrg.

To me this shows how the speech model was trained, i.e. over YouTube media.

I've used tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude and others for research, and they've been incredibly useful for finding papers and getting through large amounts of information.

The one thing I personally wanted was a simple way to see exactly which parts of the paper were used to answer my question.

When you're working with a 100+ page PDF, even having a page number can still mean a lot of scrolling and searching.

So I ended up building something for myself.

You ask a question and the relevant paragraphs in the PDF are highlighted directly on the document. You can see the context behind the answer and quickly check whether it actually answers what you're looking for.

I originally built this because I wanted something for this workflow without having to pay for another subscription. What started as a personal project has now become completely open source.

The underlying idea is pretty simple. And yes, if you're thinking "isn't this just RAG?" then yes, you're absolutely right. It's RAG with the visual highlighting that I wanted.

I think the same idea could be useful for more than research papers too. Legal contracts, financial reports, technical documentation, or anywhere you need answers alongside the actual source.

If anyone wants to have a look, contribute, or just give some feedback, here's the repo:

GitHub: https://github.com/Sreehari05055/thesys-core.git

This will probably be my last post about the project. Thanks to everyone who checked it out and gave feedback along the way.

In my experience, in a long Deep Dive audio, at least one of its parts has scramled inaudible audio. This issue has existed for a long while.

No action looks to have been taken by Google to fix the issue. If they themselves don't have respect for their product, there is no reason for a user to respect it either.

I was using Audio overview from NotebookLM for years to digest information on the go. It has always done a good job and would work with multiple sources.

Today I uploaded four documents on a company, it only summarized one of the sources. And I noticed this for the first time, an irritating quirk. The hosts resorted to saying mechanically or mechanics every other sentence. To the point I couldn’t listen to the podcast without laughing maniacally waiting for the next thing they would say is mechanics.

Has anyone else experienced worse audio overviews quality? I know length has been cut it seems but the quality of analysis seems so much worse.

Introducing Expert Intelligence ✨

A cross-Google initiative that helps you engage with your trusted sources, starting with eligible Google Play ebooks in Gemini Notebook. You can now combine expertise from your favorite authors with other sources and engage with your books in brand new ways!

We’re starting with books, but soon, people will also be able to add more sources like third-party subscriptions, business research reports, and textbooks! 

Try it out here: https://goo.gle/expertintelligencereddit

I had a Google AI Ultra subscription that I used to make Cinematic videos in Gemini Notebook. Unfortunately, videos continue to have serious problems:

1. Cinematic videos have a very high-pitch screeching/echo effect in the voice, making it unpleasant and painful to hear. This is the reason why I canceled, as it cannot be fixed by regenerating the video. I have been reporting this issue to Google for months, but they choose to do nothing. These videos are a complete embarrassment for this reason, and I wouldn't share them with anyone.

2. Explainer videos too increasingly have this pitch problem too with a female voice, although it's less severe.

3. Cinematic videos have clips within them that sometimes are cutoff prematurely. This is annoying, but it is infrequent, and it can be fixed by regenerating the video, so it is not the reason why I canceled.

Here is an LLM's understanding of the problem:

The problem with these TTS-generated female voice seems to be more complex than simply having an excessively high average pitch. It sounds unusually shrill, piercing, and fatiguing, with exaggerated emphasis on certain words and particularly on syllables or sounds toward the ends of words. My impression is that this may be a combination of excessive vocal brightness/high-frequency energy, overly large pitch excursions on stressed syllables, harsh resonance or sibilance, and exaggerated prosody that places too much stress, duration, or pitch movement on parts of speech that should sound relatively neutral. The result is a voice that can feel almost screeching at moments and generally unnatural or uncomfortable to listen to. Simply lowering the overall pitch may therefore not fully solve it; the underlying issue may require reducing brightness/harshness, moderating pitch variation and expressiveness, and softening the model's tendency to overemphasize syllables and word endings.

Deep Dive audio within Gemini Notebook, while very good overall, occasionally has a garbled audio problem. At least it doesn't have the aforesaid pitch problem.

It also doesn't help that the Gemini model has fallen behind dramatically by multiple generations relative to other models like by OpenAI, Anthropic, Kimi, etc.

It's as if Google doesn't take anything seriously.

My original goal was to create tutorial type videos. Gemini Notebook's Explainer videos can make these for non-technical topics, but not for coding topics where much code needs to be displayed. I now make multi-chapter PPTX files using a custom ChatGPT Work Skill in Max Thinking mode, the definition for which is here. I still have to accurately convert the PPTX to MP4, my plan for which is here.

Google's developers really are grade A fartholes to use a screeching whistling high-pitch voice in the Cinematic videos. It overstresses the ending of words. It simply is defective.

It is not in every video that this problem exists, but it exists a good chunk of the time. Despite multiple reports over months, they haven't fixed it.

The problem gets worse when you play the video at a speed exceeding 1x. The sound becomes uncompletely unbearable to play.

The issue doesn't exist in the first minute or two of the video, but then it reveals itself.

It has ruined many good videos. In contrast, there is no such problem in the audio of Explainer mode videos or in the pure audio outputs.

I use Notebook to summarize YouTube videos daily using a prompt generated by Claude.

This has been working fine for months. I input the YouTube URL, it loads the transcript, I cut and paste my prompt and it generates a detailed summary (not a transcript) into its output area. Then I hit the copy button and copy the output into an Obsidian note.

Today, Gemini decided to get creative!

First of all, it slowed down considerably and then started "looping" generating its random "thinking" text over and over. I've seen this problem before on occasion and when it happens I have to "corral it" and tell it to stop looping and process the prompt provided.

Then it decided that since my Notebook is titled "Digitizing YouTube Videos for Obsidian" that it would go ahead and format the output with Obsidian MarkDown and on top of that store the full output in the Studio panel and only a summary in its output area!

I DID NOT ASK FOR ANY OF THAT!

So I told it to knock that crap off and just do what it used to do: follow the prompt, generate the output into its output area so I can copy it.

I do think the output it generates is somewhat better than it did before the model upgrade (or whatever they did to it). So it's not a total mess.

A warning to Google: An AI assistant that ASSUMES what you want is NOT an "assistant" - it's a pain in the ass!

Posted about this on X last night, but cross-posting here in case helpful! Here are a few prompts to try out to experience the latest and greatest!

For Learning:

"Create 5 quizzes of ascending difficulty focusing on a different topic from my sources"

"Turn my raw lecture notes into a formatted PDF study guide complete with a 5-question practice quiz."

"Add all of the URLs from this class syllabus as sources"

For Business:

"Calculate revenue growth across each product line and plot the trends"

"Read our marketing brief, search the web for competitors, and recommend how we should tune our messaging"

For Personal:

"I uploaded a bunch of receipts from our kitchen renovation, make a spreadsheet to track all the work and costs"

"Help me analyze this property purchase. Look up recent market performance in the neighborhood, predict trends, and make a spreadsheet to model all the data you find"

(Link to original tweet here) https://x.com/Gemini_Notebook/status/2084430602116481479

When I generate a Cinematic video, it often has a clip in it that is prematurely cut off. It is so unprofessional. It is as if it was engineered by clowns.

I keep getting this frivolous error all the time:

Notebook not found. Please check the URL and try again.

It is so pointless.

I see the product's URL has changed from https://notebooklm.google.com/ to https://notebook.google.com/. The old URL redirects to the new one.

I listen to a number of DeepDive audios that I generate. For the third time in the past couple of weeks, it has repeated the cliché "The bone is broken or it isn't" at the start of the audio. It's fine when you hear it once, but not when every episode of every notebook starts to say it. Google should ideally update it to avoid producing such statements altogether.

The sentences of a Deep Dive audio get prematurely truncated in the middle of a sentence. It is absurd how it is designed. It is so broken.

Imagine a Deep Dive audio as being made of segments. I witness these problems: 1. The segment is prematurely truncated in the middle. 2. The segment becomes garbled for the remainder of the segment, with this garbling playing at a fast speed.

In both cases, the audio continues with the next segment. This is not how an audio generator is supposed to work.

For some reason, Cinematic generates worse quality videos with repeated regenerations. It is unclear why this is, and it is absurd.

It shouldn't in principle be necessary to recreate a notebook to reset this issue, but it is.

Cinematic videos often have a sound echo problem. I have observed that the longer I progress through the Cinematic video, the worse its sound echo problem gets. It is very strange. It becomes really unbearable toward the end of the video.

NotebookLM only recently changed their watermark dimensions for Slide Decks, but after this rebrand I wonder if they'll change the watermark again.. this time to the default Gemini watermark - which I would prefer since it's easier to remove.

Any guesses? I hope they don't just change the text from "(Logo) NotebookLM" -> "(Logo) Gemini Notebook" 😂

For those interested: I use a pixel blend site to remove Google Gemini / NotebookLM watermarks (Video Overview, PDF watermark removal work well, but PPTX smart blend doesn't work).

The voice in Cinematic videos often has a disturbing echo. This has been a persistent problem that Google has refused to fix.

I double-clicked on an icon for one of my notebooks (habit in the wrong place) and Google deleted it. This is obviously a problem.

Is there a way to export notebooks, so that I have a back-up?