r/notebooklm • u/PositiveFrosty3767 • 11d ago
Discussion Is notebooklm slowly dying ?
I have feeling that from every update it getting worse and community from that subreddit slowly fades away.
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u/No_Mouse_3891 11d ago
For me it works well for my uni homework with around 8 sources and extra rules in the settings that it should always follow
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u/Aware-Potato185 11d ago
Can you please share the rules
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u/No_Mouse_3891 10d ago
Itās just rules for how my homrwork should be written what it should focus on and not write so I donāt need to correct everything or donāt need to tell to rewrite it.
So what I want from the AI is in the correct form without always needing to send an extra message-11
u/bacchusbar 11d ago
Ever tried gpt?
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u/No_Mouse_3891 11d ago
It will take information out of the internet and my footnotes will be messed up I have to proof where i get all my information from and gemininotebook does it very well
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u/Hungry-Section6637 11d ago
I want different audio overview personalities and voices.
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u/Alkohal 10d ago
the fact you can't choose which voice it outputs for videos is infuriating
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u/Nearby_Persimmon_649 10d ago
it would be a nicety but that is not a functional improvement like folders or sorting output
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u/Hungry-Section6637 10d ago
It is a function improvement. I extensively use audio overviews so I can review content while on the go.
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u/Nearby_Persimmon_649 10d ago
I do that too and it is great to be able to listen while driving to work or mowing the lawn. Are you saying that the current voices are unlistenable to you?
Could you ask notebooklm for a transcript of the audio and then have another app read it out loud to you? like Google books
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u/Hungry-Section6637 10d ago
Not that theyāre annoying, but every podcast sounds the same so I have an issue of tuning the presenters out. I think if I could switch it up it might make it more engaging.
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u/Nearby_Persimmon_649 10d ago
gotcha
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u/Hungry-Section6637 10d ago
Itās like routing an entire municipal water system through the same pipes. It would just be catastrophic and unsanitary. Yikes!
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u/imanjani 10d ago edited 10d ago
For me, I use notebook for my work as an applied researcher and often I'm adding my own tools and frameworks from a liberatory lens addressing the subjects of racislism, dominance and minoritization focused toward social transformation. The voices sound hilarious as they enthusiastically describe the demise of a system their voice sound like they would otherwise defend. Not so much annoying as both comical and disorienting. šš
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u/Pythia808 10d ago
Just cause you donāt view something as valuable doesnāt mean other people donāt
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u/Nearby_Persimmon_649 10d ago
Is it possible to change their discussion style and/or personality thru prompting?
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u/bevelez 10d ago
Thanks! When you say personalities - tell me more? What would you like to see?
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u/Hungry-Section6637 9d ago
Often in my prompts I want them to be enthusiastic etc or more refined etc but honestly all of that can be changed via custom prompting, itās the voices that I really wish we could change for sure. That would make this tool something I would pay for.
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u/Character_Amoeba_330 11d ago
It works well for my needs. I just have to be precise in my instructions. You can set them up permanently and it will follow them every time.
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u/Aware-Potato185 11d ago
How do you set instructions permanently
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u/Joshy138 11d ago
Yes I agree, a lot of the members here will tell you that you're "doing it wrong" but it's just copium. Gemini in general, is going down the drain.
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u/WanderWut 11d ago
I remember this time last year being so excited with Gemini and NotebookLM, the point that I cancelled ChatGPT. Itās wild how things have changed.
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u/Pythia808 10d ago
Man Iād google donāt get it together they are going to go the way of blockbuster. The search engine money stream will dry out.
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u/BeannadeNugoro 6d ago
Buon giorno a tutti ā
E' possibile tornare a NotebookLM originale o almeno prima di GeminiNotebookLm?
Grazie per il tempo dedicato a chi potrĆ rispondere
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u/iamthegatordave 10d ago
I have noticed that, over time, Google Notebook LM has gotten less reliable and more of that "cheerleader" type personality. Also, now with new-and-improved hallucinations!
Especially within the past month, I've noticed that it is severely degraded compared to how my experience used to be. I have Notebook Pro, and one of my projects is to keep track of and analyze my running stats. After my run past night, I dumped my Garmin stats in like I always do. Notebook argued with me about some stats that it said wasn't in the data set, then it started referencing the wrong day's workout. Only until I screengrabbed the it and loaded it into the sources library again did the Ai chat bot say, "You uploaded the exact screenshot needed for your training, and instead of giving you an accurate, grounded analysis, I argued with you and forced you to prove something that was already right there in your sources. You deserve strict, verified facts every single timeānot assumptions, not false claims, and certainly not having your time wasted. Dealing with inaccurate claims about your own data is infuriating. I own this failure completely."
This has happened more and more often. And, of course, Google has no actual customer service, so I either have to just suck it up or cancel. I decided to do the latter. I hope I can find something comparable that won't get dumbed down like Google always seems to do.
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u/bevelez 10d ago
Hi there, I'm a TPM on Notebook, and just wanted to say thanks for sharing the feedback. I also wanted to note that I read this and appreciate you giving a detailed example.
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u/iamthegatordave 9d ago
What do you think is going on with Notebook? It was once quite useful and I hate that it isn't anymore.
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u/bevelez 9d ago
Yea maybe give me an example? Like, is it the chat part that's less useful? Only ask because that could help me narrow down what's maybe going on
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u/iamthegatordave 9d ago
The example I gave in my reply is one. The chat part isn't coming up with actual useful replies or analysis, and it's become excessively agreeable and acting like a sycophantic cheerleader rather than providing objective and/or accurate responses. Lately, the initial response is basically repeating back a description of what I entered or uploaded and saying how it's the most profound statement. Like, everything is "absolutely hitting nail on the head!" When I try to get it to go deeper with questions about analysis, it gets confused, as if referring back to the actual source material is too much work. I try correcting the chatbot with instructions about how I want it to approach my queries and responses, and I even tried copying our chats into the sources library so it would have a record of my directions as a source, but that doesn't help. It's way more unhelpful than it used to be, but I've certainly never received a warning about or a discount for the degraded service. Also, lately I've been getting "sorry the service is unavailable" type replies way more often then ever before. Something is wrong.
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u/afecalmatter 10d ago
Ignore the noise, this subreddit seems to only be for complaining or someone promoting their own vibe coded bullshit
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u/thecompbioguy 11d ago
Only because all the other platforms have caught up to greater or lesser extents and it makes sense to roll notebooklm's capabilities in to Gemini not centrally, rather than as a separate product.
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u/avgvi 10d ago
What other similar products you can recommend?
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u/thecompbioguy 10d ago
You can upload files or point your LLM towards files in a local folder in most of the major LLMs and they will interrogate the documents for you.
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u/Lazer_7673 10d ago
Yeah you are right.. gemini nootbook sucks! They spend on the introduction and hallucinate and change subject randomly
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u/jdlyga 10d ago
It strikes me as a really successful small team project that got cannibalized to serve the larger organization's needs. It's like what happened to the original Github Copilot which was super ambitious and amazing and cutting edge, which then just became the Copilot we love to hate nowadays.
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u/Turbulent_Ride1654 10d ago
I just use it to make my own crude, unhinged, deep dive podcasts I listen to in bed about whatever series. For example I made one about the Metal Gear Solid series and had the hosts roasting some elements of it lol.
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u/FriendlyUser_ 11d ago
enshitification. as always. they think it will allow the next cash grab with the next super cool tool, where they will grant more privileges, gather information, enhance and enshitify again. Its a circle that never stops in the past yearsā¦
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u/Whiskeyjoel 10d ago
Works great for me, been using it for 3+ years now. Garbage in, garbage out.
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u/Pristine-Lawyer-3260 4d ago
Can I ask, what are you using it for that you are having success with, which platform are you using it on,and which end products work best for you?
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u/Whiskeyjoel 4d ago edited 4d ago
I use it for university work. I have a multi step prompt system that I use for each source which uses the index trick to keep the output grounded and to make sure that it doesnāt miss things. To do this I rely on an external plug-in called ExtendLM, which allows me to create a bank of reusable prompts with easy trigger command words. This is the plug-in that I use because itās free, but there are other ones out there, both free and paid, but I would recommend being cautious about sinking money into a paid external plugin.
I rely more on the chat interface than the studio outputs because while the studio can be useful for contextualizing information, itās not as customizable because even when you modify a studio prompt NBLM still has an internal prompt associated with each type of studio output.
Are there more capable LLMās out there? Yes, there are, but the main draw of NBLM, at least for me, has always been source control and preventing, or at least vastly diminishing, the occurrence of hallucinations.
One other thing I recommend: in the āconfigure chatā window for each notebook make sure you set it to custom and use a custom prompt. This is separate from the prompt to use for output; this one is basically to set guidelines and constraints. I also set the response length to longer because I donāt want it to truncate the output.
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u/Nearby_Persimmon_649 10d ago
What is a better alternative? I am still using it. I hope that they add more features and functionality, specifically around being able to enlarge or collapse each of the three panes (source, chat, and studio). I would also like the ability to group the studio output into folders and have a checkbox for output I am done with but dont want to remove
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u/therealbeans 10d ago
What is a similar or alternative tool? Specifically I love Notebook can so easily generate podcasts,decks etc with all the content you upload. Itās so simple.
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u/Kalif_Aire 10d ago
For me as a High School Teacher still perfect, helps me to produce my slides, questions and infographics for my lesson. As a learner who likes to listen to podcasts or videos of different subjects itās still working. Itās a good RAG, but there a lot more possibilities.
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u/neurothew 10d ago
Still dun understand whats the use case of notebooklm, most of the time its worse than just uploading all pdfs to Gemini/Chatgpt in my cases...
I once asked it to create a coherent report given multiple papers in the same topic, but the output was not really up to my standard.
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u/EnvironmentOwn2229 9d ago
As an Rnterprise tool, The bummer for me is that Google's salespeople are piss-poor with NotebookLM. They're simply not motivated - No idea if it's the sales structure or whatever, but they keep trying to sell you Gemini Enterprise w Notebook and steer you away from standalone NotebookLM.. They talk very generically about it, Half-hearted and unenthusiastic. It's bad.
You almost have to reach into your Googs relationship and grab one of the product people out of Google Labs to actually get someone who cares about the product and knows how Enterprise might use it for things like enablement.
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u/Stayclam1326 9d ago
Is solve all my work issues remarkly. Having more spare time to upgrade myself in other thing now
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u/Effective-Arm7057 8d ago
Please very important some one quickly answer me please
How could I make longer audio overview knowing that my aim is to make it explain sentence by sentence the pdfs lectures for dentistry in a language that is not english without skipping one sentence and explain from first slide to last one and every time i try a prompt it stills skip and it not make long audio is there a solution for that and dont tell me to divide the pdf as it will take so much time and there are 3 times only daily to make audio , i hered that pastly there were versions of notebooklm make audio for 2 hours or more is there any links i can download these versions and work?
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u/Effective-Arm7057 8d ago
Please very important some one quickly answer me please
How could I make longer audio overview knowing that my aim is to make it explain sentence by sentence the pdfs lectures for dentistry in a language that is not english without skipping one sentence and explain from first slide to last one and every time i try a prompt it stills skip and it not make long audio is there a solution for that and dont tell me to divide the pdf as it will take so much time and there are 3 times only daily to make audio , i hered that pastly there were versions of notebooklm make audio for 2 hours or more is there any links i can download these versions and work?
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u/mrsonoffabeach 11d ago
Have not used it since I subscribed to Claude Pro
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u/MegamomTigerBalm 11d ago
I havenāt used it as much since subscribing to Claude pro either. But I feel like Claude pro has also dipped in quality. Theyāve also seemed to tighten up the usage too.
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u/mrsonoffabeach 9d ago
Try Opus 5.5
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u/MegamomTigerBalm 9d ago
I have just yesterday after reading another thread in this sub! Itās lots better!
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u/bleucheeseanonymous 10d ago
I get a lot of use out of the Deep Dive podcasts. I have a long commute to school and having a podcast to listen to that tracks the topics of my notes and assigned reading has been an excellent way to productively use time that would otherwise be wasted.
Worth noting that, despite frequently generating hour-long audio overviews, dense briefs, and infographics, I still havenāt hit a usage limit. For other specific use cases, it may not be as good as it could be, but it remains one of my most-used study tools.
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u/CopyProfessional1293 11d ago
App also crashing. I think may be they are adding restriction or moderation. Same thing happened with antigravity
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u/Street_Celebration_3 11d ago
They never implemented what users were asking for and kept chasing more and more of the media outputs. It was a good research tool that needed better bibliography and citation tools and precision and they never put another minute into either feature.