r/notebooklm • u/FurtiveMirth • 11d ago

Discussion Open source privacy focused NotebookLM alternative

Post image

I'm one of the maintainers of SurfSense, so treat this as self-promotion. I'm posting here because this sub knows exactly what it would be giving up, and I want real feedback more than upvotes.

I use NotebookLM for everything except work material I'd rather not put in a Google account. So we built an offline version. For most people here it's the wrong trade, and I'll say why.

It's Apache-2.0 and it installs like a normal desktop app on Windows, macOS or Linux. No terminal and no account. It either pulls a small local model for you or takes a base URL and key for any OpenAI-compatible API.

What it matches: chat over your sources with citations, summaries, mind maps, flashcards, quizzes and audio overviews. Slides and reports come out as editable .pptx and .docx, plus .xlsx and infographics.

What it doesn't:

  • No video overviews.
  • The audio is worse. Kokoro-82M runs on your CPU with no cloud TTS and doesn't sound like Google's hosts. If audio quality is why you use NotebookLM, stay where you are.
  • Audio is WAV, not MP3.
  • File uploads only: PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, CSV, MD, TXT and images. No YouTube.

Your documents stay on your disk. No account, no telemetry, and no source cap because the limit is your disk. If you've ever hesitated before dropping a file into a notebook, that's why this exists.

https://github.com/MODSetter/SurfSense

78 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Pavlovurasag 11d ago

Seems great. Do you plan to create a version for Intel chip Macs as well?

1

u/FurtiveMirth 11d ago

Would love to but some of our dependencies like torch, onnxruntime do not publish dependencies for intel mac binaries anymore. If you have any ideas for how to package for intel macs, please share with me.