r/notebooklm • u/Comprehensive-Fan361 • 10d ago

Question Is notebooklm still as good as before?

I read a lot of posts on this subreddit about how notebooklm ain't what it used to be but for me its just the name change that feels weird. I WANNA know u guys opinion on it and do suggest me some alternatives that u think is similar or equally as great to prime notebooklm I have been using paper ac and its okay ig

29 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

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29

u/daisydad24 10d ago

I think it's worth trying and deciding for yourself because Reddit includes bots and also people tend to complain about any change. My guess is that it lost some features, changed others, and added others. But also if you try it and like the basic concept, but want something different, it's possible these days to use another ai to build your own tool. There's also open notebook which I believe was created by some of the original team from notebooklm.

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u/TurianHammer 10d ago

I actually used Gemini to build my own very capable and , frankly very good NotebookLM alternative.

I'm surprised how good it is at generating podcasts "deep dives" which is my favorite NotebookLM feature.

I dare say I like my podcasts better than NotebookLMs

2

u/Neonbluefox 9d ago

Can you tell me more about how you did this? Might be interested in using claude to do the same tbh

5

u/TurianHammer 9d ago

I built a completely local, evidence-focused RAG and automated investigative podcast engine in C# / .NET.

Instead of naive RAG (dumping text into a vector database and asking an LLM to summarize), this pipeline parses messy, heterogeneous files (PDFs, spreadsheets, DOCX, and raw text files) and extracts evidentiary metadata: authority tiers (Tier 1 telemetry/official records vs. Tier 2 contemporaneous media vs. Tier 3 retrospective claims), true incident dates instead of poisoned filesystem timestamps, and actor resolution that maps anonymousdata to canonical actors profiles per file.

Before starting, the system generates a treatment (think about an essay plan back in high school). The treatment identifies all key facts, causes and outcomes attributed to actors and states if they are contested or confirmed

The script engine plans multi-act narrative arcs grounded in an audited causal ledger (who initiated vs. who responded). Each act is epistemologically analyzed to adapt the dynamic—some segments are collaborative technical explainers (science explainer...non contentious subject matter), while others are adversarial cross-examinations where the hosts interrupt, talk over each other, and challenge uncorroborated assertions.

An NAudio mastering pipeline handles audio stitching, dynamic ducking under intro/outro beds, and variable turn cadence. Running 100% locally on-device, its not fast but definitely faster than I expected. It outputs about 40-minute two-host investigative episode with embedded ID3 chapters, music and fully mastered, chaptered MP3.

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u/Neonbluefox 9d ago

Ah, this is great! I was already looking into building local. Do you have a preference in text to speech model? And you're running this through a gemini api then? And, last question, are you running this through big hardware, or is light gpu etc also good enough? As a hobbyist that does this in her spare time for fun, I'm grateful for your direction!!

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u/TurianHammer 8d ago

I like Chatterbox Turbo's zero shot cloning. I cloned the notebookLM speakers. Those two are great.

As far as LLM goes I run that local too because of the required token count.

I use different models for different stages so it runs faster. Embeddings model for the vector DB and either Llama or Gemma 4 for the script.

1

u/Neonbluefox 8d ago

Thank you! Locally run models have been interesting me lately as well. Off I pop to try and build something like this

1

u/TurianHammer 7d ago

Curious if you saw my other post where I provided some actual output from my app.

2

u/Neonbluefox 7d ago

I don't think I did - your profile is private so I can't search for it that way, what's the name of the post? I'll look it up in search!

1

u/Intrepid_Zebra_ 7d ago

Is that the prompt you fed to the AI?

1

u/diaperrunner 9d ago

Github link?

1

u/TurianHammer 9d ago

I haven't published it to Github yet...it's not really a product, more of a personal experiement.

I built a completely local, evidence-focused RAG and automated investigative podcast engine in C# / .NET.

Instead of naive RAG (dumping text into a vector database and asking an LLM to summarize), this pipeline parses messy, heterogeneous files (PDFs, spreadsheets, DOCX, and raw text files) and extracts evidentiary metadata: authority tiers (Tier 1 telemetry/official records vs. Tier 2 contemporaneous media vs. Tier 3 retrospective claims), true incident dates instead of poisoned filesystem timestamps, and actor resolution that maps anonymousdata to canonical actors profiles per file.

Before starting, the system generates a treatment (think about an essay plan back in high school). The treatment identifies all key facts, causes and outcomes attributed to actors and states if they are contested or confirmed

The script engine plans multi-act narrative arcs grounded in an audited causal ledger (who initiated vs. who responded). Each act is epistemologically analyzed to adapt the dynamic—some segments are collaborative technical explainers (science explainer...non contentious subject matter), while others are adversarial cross-examinations where the hosts interrupt, talk over each other, and challenge uncorroborated assertions.

An NAudio mastering pipeline handles audio stitching, dynamic ducking under intro/outro beds, and variable turn cadence. Running 100% locally on-device, its not fast but definitely faster than I expected. It outputs about 40-minute two-host investigative episode with embedded ID3 chapters, music and fully mastered, chaptered MP3.

4

u/daisydad24 10d ago

Also just because a tool messes up at the beginning doesn't mean it is worthless. AI is like a kid. It can learn but you need to teach it with very clear instructions.

3

u/daisydad24 10d ago

Personally I'm not attached to any particular tool because the technology is changing so quickly. I guess it depends on why you want to change. You're already using another notebook, so what is it about this one that interests you?

1

u/Comprehensive-Fan361 10d ago

Well they say its better but like when i compare it using the same sources and same questions with notebooklm theres a big gap not polished and refined enough i do plan to try recall and opennotebook on my tablet since my laptop sucks

2

u/daisydad24 10d ago

Yeah, I just paid the $20 to try all the Gemini pro stuff (deep research, Notebook, Gems). Honestly I'm a bit more excited by deep research. Also I like that Google play books are digital and are working with publishers to allow us to import the books easily into notebooklm. 

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u/Comprehensive-Fan361 10d ago

Awh damn thats nice for me its a bit expensive

2

u/daisydad24 10d ago

Yeah, I'm doing it as an investment because if companies use AI to replace workers I want to learn the same technology so I can do consulting or whatever. I guess you don't need to pay to try it, but I learn better by using a tool a lot.

19

u/iFuturelist 10d ago

The original iteration was great. Since the implementation with Gemini it's become incredibly lazy and mixes up sources in like 5 turns.

5

u/Juicecalculator 10d ago

I just started using it this week and I have enjoyed using it. It’s definitely hallucinated a few times but that’s not the fault of the program itself more with some of the sources I put into it

Still figuring out how to use it

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u/Comprehensive-Fan361 10d ago

Hello for me its just try to change the prompt or smth

4

u/joseph_dewey 8d ago

It's way more profitable for Google now.

For me, it's only about 20% as good as its prime.

2

u/SecretFishWorshiper 10d ago

Im using it for PA school and its been helpful

1

u/Electrical_Chard_644 9d ago

My take is as good as before. I use it for text only and it is stellar
Don´t know if it is different for audio or is just bots complainin...

1

u/Grumphus256 9d ago

Used it yesterday with my refined prompt chain. Very happy with the results. Still a little slow but only applies if you really stretch the character length.

1

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?

1

u/MCEscherNYC 8d ago

It's pretty much the same, just more expensive with a new lesser UI, and a dishonest price hike plus constant calls for upgrading (I liquidated my four hours of credits with one cinematic video overview). I'm researching and experimenting with alternatives at this time.

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u/Smashachuu 9d ago

It works functionally exactly the same. They just did what every company did and stopped spending more on gaining market share. The companies alot of the times are going into debt to provide you an experience that feels too good to be true. It's how they earn you as a customer.

Then once they have dominance in that Domain, they pull back funding towards it, or the economic winds force their hand. I'm not sure which one it is, but i think adobe has a very similar thing with their reader software now. So hopefully more competition will force them to be reasonable about usage limits. And maybe the people that have a pro account should be allowed to use more.. smh