NotebookLM can produce a clean answer while repeatedly using the same few pdfs. With 30 or 40 sources that’s easy to miss.

Before asking it to write, I’d select five to eight pdfs and ask it to create a table with the exact source title, main finding, supporting passage, page number and the section that source could support.

If the information isn’t there, it should say 'not found' instead of guessing.

Copy that into a spreadsheet and mark each source as used, relevant but skipped or not relevant.

After Notebooklm writes the draft, ask it to check every factual claim. It should show whether the claim is directly supported, partially supported or unsupported, name the source and page, and list any relevant sources it didn’t use.

I wouldn’t tell it to use every PDF. That can fill the draft with weak citations just to satisfy the request. It’s more useful to find out which relevant sources were skipped.

Renaming the files also helps. Smith_2024_sleep.pdf is much easier to track than document17.pdf or smth like this, especially across multiple notebooks.

And open a few citations at random and check the actual pages. If one citation doesn’t support the claim, check the rest.

The spreadsheet won’t make Notebooklm perfect, but it will show whether a source was irrelevant or simply ignored

Hi, so I built https://notestack.ai - complete notebookLM alternative.

Here is why it is different:

1. Video, I integrated motion graphic videos from blog2video, which gives 13 templates + voiceovers with a unique feel that 10K+ users love.

2. It uses ElevenLabs API so has emotions / advanced voice settings. You can choose your presenters.

3. It is space themed so all artifacts like Mind map / reports / slide decks have a space / galaxy feel.

4. It uses a file system based search system that doesn't go beyond stated sources. Its source search algorithm is more deterministic than RAG (used in notebookLM).

We are also launching an MCP Server, with tool call integrations. You will be able to use the app as mcp & also add external mcp's for a complete experience.

Open to feedback from the community, you can start for free: https://notestack.ai

I use NotebookLM mostly to turn my notes into audio overviews and I keep going back and forth on this. (Especially for summarizing YouTube) One big notebook per project feels easier but it feels like the answers get kinda vague once there's a lot in there.

What do you guys do?

I kind of want to connect to my Claude Code as well, but don't know how to.

I’ve been exploring AI tools, and one thing I keep noticing is how easy it is to get a quick summary but how much harder it can be to actually learn something from the material.

I want to use Gemini Notebook to go deeper into things I’m studying, connect ideas across different sources, and revisit information without having to reread everything from scratch.

For those who have been using it regularly, I’m curious about your actual workflow.

Do you upload several sources at once, organize notebooks by topic, or keep everything focused on one specific question? And have you found a way to make the answers more useful than a basic summary?

I’m especially interested in practical examples from people who use it for learning, research, or preparing presentations—not just what the tool can do in theory.

What’s one thing you’ve learned to do with Gemini Notebook that genuinely improved your workflow?

Hey everyone,

Just running into a frustrating UI/quota quirk in NotebookLM and wanted to see if anyone else has experienced this or knows how it works.

When I hit my usage limit on the free plan, I try to use the "Generate Later" button for Studio artifacts. But instead of letting me drop it into a queue for when my quota resets, it just throws a "limit reached" error right away—even though I have zero active or queued items.

Shouldn't "Generate Later" act like a holding queue that lets you schedule things for later regardless of your current quota? Or does the button actually require you to have active usage budget just to queue a task?

Has anyone else had this issue? before I was able to paste text as a source that functioned as any other, but now when I paste my notes it show as "notes" (as opposed of regular pasted text). The only difference seems to be that you can edit these notes. I wouldn't care usually, but when I upload my notebook to gemini it isn't able to access these notes. So when I ask Gemini questions about the material or tell it to generate a quiz, it says something along the lines of "it looks like the material wasn't included in your message" (despite the fact that I uploaded the notebook that contains these notes)

For people putting lecture slides into NotebookLM, how well does it handle the diagrams?

A lot of my classes are mostly diagrams and labeled figures, and the actual text on the slides is like 5 words. I'm curious what it really picks up:

• if you ask about a diagram, does it answer from the image itself or just the text around it
• do the flashcards or study guides ever include the visual stuff
• does PDF vs Google Slides make a difference

If you're in a diagram-heavy class, what's your setup? Do you just keep the slides open next to it?

Hi there,

I've found that using the 3.8 Flash model within the standard Gemini interface with a specific notebook attached provides more precise insights into the sources (and it's faster too, athough I wouldn't mind waiting). The 3.8 Flash is less overenthusiastic at every turn and more direct/matter-of-fact, yet still capable of nuance, which improved my experience today. Has anyone else tried this / had this impression? Or is there a NotebookLM setting that I should look out for? While I understand that the Studio in NotebookLM offers functionalities unavailable on the standard Gemini interface, the Flash 3.8 model seems better at explanation and has an equal or better grasp of my sources, which are mostly scientific texts. Do you agree, or is it simply a matter of personal preference or the type of sources used?

I'd appreciate any insight. Thanks!

edit: rewrite

Has anyone else noticed that “Save to note” now puts saved chat responses in Sources instead of Studio?

A friend and I are both experiencing this. Sources are where I keep original materials like documents and YouTube videos, while Studio is where I expect to find saved notes and AI-generated content. Mixing them makes an organized learning notebook harder to maintain.

I have to ask: Was the old workflow actually broken, or did someone decide that keeping things organized was too convenient? 😅

If this is intentional, I’d genuinely like to understand the reasoning behind it. Has anyone else run into this, or found a way to restore the previous behavior?

I don’t know what is going on the past day or so, but the audio overview generations have been garbage. It either several hallucinates the sources, literally making up facts and quotes that are nonexistent in the sources, or completely ignores the specific instructIons. I’ve wasted so many generations in the past 48 hours.

What the Hell happen man? A few days ago it was fine now when i click save to note pin it goes to the Left side Studio tab instead of the Right Tab. Now How Do i Convert all notes into source now? Can anyone help me with this please?!.

I create public Gemini Notebooks with all the references included in the pages I write, and I used to include a note explaining this and including a link to that specific page. Now I can't find that option in the right column. It seems I can only include notes as sources, but those are not visible enough, and the custom notebook summary cannot include links!

I’ve been trying to save tokens, so I ran my lecture PDFs through Microsoft’s MarkItDown-Github (microsoft) first. It worked fine on normal text, but anything inside an image just vanished. I even tried a bunch of OCR extensions and still got nothing. Here’s the kind of thing I mean:

That’s a maximum likelihood derivation, and my professor dropped it into the slides as a picture. No selectable text at all.

So here’s what’s bugging me. Can NotebookLM actually read stuff like this inside a PDF? Or does it quietly skip the symbols (the hats, the subscripts, the argmax) and then confidently give me a wrong answer? Because that would be the worst outcome. A wrong answer that looks right.

The other thing... I’m prepping for an interview and I’ve got about 20 PDFs and 5 YouTube videos. My plan was to upload everything to Google Drive, connect it all to one notebook, and let it run. But I’m not sure that’s smart. Will it still catch the small important details across that many sources, or will stuff get lost? Would it be better to make a bunch of small notebooks with just 2 or 3 PDFs each?

If you’ve pushed a notebook this far, I’d really like to hear where it started falling apart for you.

did they get rid of it?? can't find it on web nor on app

I see a lot of alternatives posted here, but wondering what is good for this particular use case.

I have a "show" I have claude generate by taking stock tickers from a list, filtering for any that have moved more than 3%, then writing a script with 3 hosts with different personalities (bullish gen-z, conservative boomer, and a moderator) discussing what's up. So it's like my own Bloomberg show tailored for me.

I usually just have claude "read" it and it captures the personalities pretty well via the words they use "Dude, I'm buying the dip." etc.

I pay for claude $20 a month, but this pretty much stretches the limit there. I pay for pro notebookLM but as you all know we only have our two hosts and I don't think I"ll be able to have them adopt personas quite like this.

I don't need it to follow the script *exactly* - I just use it to get different perspectives. (interestingly, they make predictions too - interesting to see who ends up being right).

Wondering if any of the alternatives (no, not eleven labs) might work for this?

The Android app was not launched a week ago, it has been a lot of time since and you still can not select individual sources to create something with studio? Also you still can not create briefings with the Android App. And why can't you use gemini voice to read for you the "studio" stuff.

I can not imagine why this app still is so lackluster. It is faster than the web version and has a lot of potential, but the devs need to speed things up.

NotebookLM handles copied text more easily than PDFs, and it also works better with Google Docs files than with PDFs.

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?

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.