When notebookLM was new, it was interesting to listen to the podcasts. Then the novelty wore off, and I wanted something where I can interact with the podcasters but it was janky as hell.
My current “audio-learning” hack is ChatGPT Live which has become shockingly good after being awful compared to Claude Voice
(Let’s not even talk about Gemini voice which is still bad).
I go on a walk and dump a paper or article link in the chat, and ask chatGPT Live to walk me through the content in small nuggets, so I can discuss them interactively. For deeper topics I have it quiz me Socratic style so I’m not just passively listening, and actually thinking through problems or ideas.
Ok so I'm going on a walk. I'll dump a link to a Hacker News
discussion about an article.
You have to read the article and the discussion and walk me thru
all the interesting details, nugget by nugget, and move on when
I'm ready for the next piece.
ChatGPT Live:
ok, Great show me the link, I'm waiting.
(I paste the link)
Me:
Ok I pasted it. Now go.
====
For the Socratic quiz I say:
I want to understand this more deeply. So instead of you just telling me
everything, lay out the problem and a question for me to think about, and
I'll try to answer. Even if I answer wrong, you should resist giving me the
answer, and instead keep digging with more questions, so that I eventually
arrive at the answer myself.
I also have a Socratic quiz skill that I wrote for using in Claude Code or Codex
to understand implementations/architecture etc:
there is a very good reason microsoft's ceo got repeatedly dunked on and it was because he literally couldn't stop babbling incoherently about having AI listen to things for him
i cannot imagine just sucking the joy out of life like this.
I wondered when the name change was coming as NotebookLM felt a bit out of place brand-wise. Still would have been killer if they called it "Bard Notebook"
Their current product naming is still terrible.They went from the Xbox, to the Xbox 360, the Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X.
"""AI Overview: No, the Asus ROG Ally is not actually an Xbox. It is a handheld Windows computer made by Asus, even though it features Xbox branding and uses an Xbox-style controller layout"""
Any people with insight on why this happens? From my corporate experience this generally happens when two teams are working on a similar thing, they complain about turf to leadership, and leadership either makes them consolidate efforts or chooses a winner. Is that what happens at Google a lot? Or do they just constantly tweak things to the point they cease to live or be used?
I've seen this sort of thing happen when something starts small and no one cares and then it gets traction. Eg: If you have a tiny toy project that the engineers call one thing, you might publish it under that name. If it then gets the attention of some higher level marketing team, you might rebrand it to align with the rest of the company.
No idea if that happened here or in google generally.
I've always attributed this sort of thing to companies outgrowing any form of manageable structure. At a scale like google, each team gets so distant from various parts of other parts of the company and the management structure gets so deep that the whole thing kinda becomes a zombie. Each part is kinda stuck in its own myopic view of the world with no oversight. Like, if you had an org where the only thing you made was AI tools, you would probably have common branding and the CEO would spend real time trying to get the naming right, but Sundar probably forgets they even made Notebook LM.
Eventually, if something makes news or when they try to trim offerings, suddenly the company can focus on it and then does course corrections.
Something of note is that this is now the third name for this product, the first name was impressively bad and so myopic that it feels kinda hilarious.
They wanted to call it Tailwind. Like the #1 CSS framework on earth.
Sundar did know about all the chat apps though. It's one thing to have internally competing things, but that shouldn't be exposed to end users. I never had a lot of confidence in his leadership either, seemed like autopilot.
Google seems to have competing orgs especially when something becomes a company-wide priority. Before it was chat apps, now it's AI. Idk if it's intentional, but it did seem that way with Jetski vs Gemini CLI, where they decided Jetski was better and nixed the other. Also ChromeOS vs Android.
And it was replaced (I expect, don’t know for sure) because GeminiCLI was built on a code base and language that didn’t scale in performance for what people were doing.
I know Gemini CLI was written in JS + React. Even the public version had a very slow startup time that some might blame on the stack. But Claude CLI is a similar stack and starts instantly, so idk, does Bun really make the difference?
Internally I didn't like Gemini CLI just because it didn't have the right skills/whatever preinstalled, so it always did stuff that made sense elsewhere but not at Google, like trying to grep through the entire monorepo. Jetski just worked.
In my experience (since Notebook is still in the name), you're going to get the same emails as before, now with additional people confused about the change and what it means for them.
I fear the upcoming changes... It ALWAYS starts with a name change, then more useless features, more ensh*ttification, then users flee, then the product is killed.
Allo, Google Talk, Hangouts Chat (not the same as Hangouts), "Meet (original)", idk maybe some other thing called Google Chat that isn't the new Google Chat, uhh my Android phone has 2 "Messages" apps so one of them is probably deprecated?
I admonish Gemini and demand explanation nearly every day of how it's possible that Google invented the thing, has the best infrastructure for inference, and somehow falls behind Anthropic and even OpenAI.
NotebookLM is pretty cool since it can hold a ton of context but this is so far below my (and frankly just reasonable) expectations of Google.
I downgraded my Gemini subscription and got Claude. Still can't believe how much better it is. Fable is way better, that's a given. But Claude even has a real .deb repo. Something Antigravity had and managed to lose.
My response is going to be about Gemini generally and less about NotebookLM.
Google's last frontier model release was Gemini 3.1 Pro, which was in February of this year[1]. At the time, it was ahead of the (at the time) flagship models of Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.2/5.3. From my recollection of the time, it was the best model in the world.
Anthropic released Opus 4.5 Nov '25, 4.6 in Feb '26, 4.7 in April, 4.8 in (late) May. Then Fable in June. 4.7 beat 3.1 Pro on multiple metrics. Fable eats it for breakfast. However, I want to note the 3 month gap between those first two Opus versions.
OpenAI released 5.2 Dec '25, 5.3 Codex Feb '26, 5.3 Instant Mar, 5.4 Mar, 5.5 (late) May, 5.6 July. 5.4 beats 3.1 Pro on agentic benchmarks[2], seems to be similar/losing on non-agentic. 5.5 seems stronger than 3.1 Pro[3].
Gemini 3.5 Pro is alleged to be launching within the week. Why do I type this all out? Because I think Google is getting a bad rap. They are delayed on a frontier release by a month or two and are being regarded as if they cannot release frontier models. I think their last release demonstrates strength and we need to see a weak release before we call them "behind" (in any reasonable sense). These companies swap back and forth constantly. I recall a multi-month span where 2.5 Pro was just the best thing out there by a large margin (in my opinion).
I was still using Gemini CLI even though Claude is better, just cause of inertia. Then one day it started refusing to work, saying I need to install Antigravity instead. Idk if that's an IDE or has a leaner CLI, but doesn't matter, I'm gone. I don't care how the sausage is made, don't randomly break the thing I'm using.
I share your sentiment. I'm still paying for Gemini but it's almost useless to me. Google has some serious internal problems. Perhaps Gemini is merely being plagued by aggressive cost controls, or perhaps there are deeper flaws in Google’s approach. Either way, I can't trust NotebookLM with serious work and have stopped using it.
Apple is placing a major bet on Google and Gemini for iOS 27. If Gemini's decline is any indication of what's to come, Apple could be in serious trouble in six month's time.
I suspect it is part leadership change (sundar/kurain) and over indexing on Ai for doing the job on top of a model that is just not as good (esp flash 3.5). Google Cloud / Gemini Enterprise sent me the greatest Slop Deck of all time. It was quite obvious it was Ai generated and the rep had only read a few slides of the 30+. I wonder if they are even aware after losing the sale
Antigravity sucks so bad that I have started to feel that google really doesn't wanna compete, they just wanna hang in there at number 2 or 3, to just annoy the number 1 and 2.
I tried Antigravity recently with Flash 3.5, and it got stuck in a loop saying the same sentence over and over. I haven't seen this pathological behavior from other LLMs in months.
For coding, I don't think they're even number 3, anymore. Seems more like 4th or 5th (unbelievably, even Mecha Hitler seems to do better, though I'm hopeful Gemini 3.5 Pro will turn things around).
Also enshittification is slowly starting. Yesterday I asked Gemini (in the Android app) for a recommendation for an app for sound recording. Instead of it answering I got a popup to allow Gemini access to open the app store (or something like that, I didn't allow it). When I declined it just stopped the conversation. It was actually hard to get it to just reply with a list of apps. And I have an AI subscription with Google!
My problem with NotebookLM was that you had to give it URLs or docs, you couldn't just have it search for docs and then incorporate them into your research.
Apparently it is Language Model, as mentioned in the announcement of NotebookLM in 2023 [0].
> Today we’re beginning to roll out Project Tailwind with its new name: NotebookLM, an experimental offering from Google Labs. It’s our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core: hence the LM.
It's funny how similar that article's intro is to today's announcement.
I feel like the name reflect the product more. I have been using NotebookLM for studying and really like it. I wonder if with this name change, would there be a major change in Gemini Notebook ?
Guys google, I know enough people in the company to know how this decision was made, but I must say as a user if you rename or kill another thing I will stop using any Google service I still use.
This might be the one time I might forgive it but guys please don't it's annoying.
NotebookLM is genuinely useful for structured research workflows. My concern is not the name. It's whether the "notebook" metaphor survives the rebrand.
I have several projects with lots sources (800+). I mostly work with webpages, papers and youtube videos. It also supports mcp if you want to connect something.
Claude/ChatGPT still end up making things up when they can't find anything, notebook is much better to 99% reply based on quotes.
But yes a backup is to use Claude and grep, but not quite the same.
I'd like to have audio overviews of scientific papers, so I can "read" them while I drive. NotebookLM/Gemini Notebook sorta does this, but the two-person podcast format is kind of annoying and it can't pronounce math.
Is there something out there that will do this? I'm sure the right harness around frontier models would make it work.
Yes- I'm the founder of www.Paper2Audio.com, a text to speech service focused on accurately reading complex docs to you such as research papers. Our free plan lets you generate 56 hours of audio per week, using high quality voices.
Feel free to email if you have any questions or feedback.
It could be monologue or dialogue, but it should be less full of verbal "syntactic sugar" than NotebookLM podcasts. More to the point, more detail-oriented, can pronounce math.
Can pronounce math is the real showstopper for me. Last time I tried, NotebookLM would try to say the TeX out loud. Like underscore dollarsign...
It's been sometime I have been using an app called nouswise. I switched right after they added nblm notebooks in Gemini. I knew they cannot stand another app competing with their flagship. But anyway, it do have audio recap and it definitely have way less of "syntactic sugar". I haven't tried but because it's agentic you can ask it to generate a monologue for you. But I assume you should be in deep mode. I so far only used the side bar for this.
My current “audio-learning” hack is ChatGPT Live which has become shockingly good after being awful compared to Claude Voice (Let’s not even talk about Gemini voice which is still bad).
I go on a walk and dump a paper or article link in the chat, and ask chatGPT Live to walk me through the content in small nuggets, so I can discuss them interactively. For deeper topics I have it quiz me Socratic style so I’m not just passively listening, and actually thinking through problems or ideas.
Me:
====For the Socratic quiz I say:
I also have a Socratic quiz skill that I wrote for using in Claude Code or Codex to understand implementations/architecture etc:https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...
>podcast slop
>letting the llm do it for you
there is a very good reason microsoft's ceo got repeatedly dunked on and it was because he literally couldn't stop babbling incoherently about having AI listen to things for him
i cannot imagine just sucking the joy out of life like this.
The latest console is the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X
"""AI Overview: No, the Asus ROG Ally is not actually an Xbox. It is a handheld Windows computer made by Asus, even though it features Xbox branding and uses an Xbox-style controller layout"""
No idea if that happened here or in google generally.
Eventually, if something makes news or when they try to trim offerings, suddenly the company can focus on it and then does course corrections.
Something of note is that this is now the third name for this product, the first name was impressively bad and so myopic that it feels kinda hilarious.
They wanted to call it Tailwind. Like the #1 CSS framework on earth.
And it was replaced (I expect, don’t know for sure) because GeminiCLI was built on a code base and language that didn’t scale in performance for what people were doing.
Internally I didn't like Gemini CLI just because it didn't have the right skills/whatever preinstalled, so it always did stuff that made sense elsewhere but not at Google, like trying to grep through the entire monorepo. Jetski just worked.
Gemini Notebook is a way better name for the masses.
Google:
- Hangout
- Chat
- Meets
- Duo
- ...
NotebookLM is pretty cool since it can hold a ton of context but this is so far below my (and frankly just reasonable) expectations of Google.
I downgraded my Gemini subscription and got Claude. Still can't believe how much better it is. Fable is way better, that's a given. But Claude even has a real .deb repo. Something Antigravity had and managed to lose.
Google's last frontier model release was Gemini 3.1 Pro, which was in February of this year[1]. At the time, it was ahead of the (at the time) flagship models of Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.2/5.3. From my recollection of the time, it was the best model in the world.
Anthropic released Opus 4.5 Nov '25, 4.6 in Feb '26, 4.7 in April, 4.8 in (late) May. Then Fable in June. 4.7 beat 3.1 Pro on multiple metrics. Fable eats it for breakfast. However, I want to note the 3 month gap between those first two Opus versions.
OpenAI released 5.2 Dec '25, 5.3 Codex Feb '26, 5.3 Instant Mar, 5.4 Mar, 5.5 (late) May, 5.6 July. 5.4 beats 3.1 Pro on agentic benchmarks[2], seems to be similar/losing on non-agentic. 5.5 seems stronger than 3.1 Pro[3].
Gemini 3.5 Pro is alleged to be launching within the week. Why do I type this all out? Because I think Google is getting a bad rap. They are delayed on a frontier release by a month or two and are being regarded as if they cannot release frontier models. I think their last release demonstrates strength and we need to see a weak release before we call them "behind" (in any reasonable sense). These companies swap back and forth constantly. I recall a multi-month span where 2.5 Pro was just the best thing out there by a large margin (in my opinion).
[1]: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7
[3]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8
Apple is placing a major bet on Google and Gemini for iOS 27. If Gemini's decline is any indication of what's to come, Apple could be in serious trouble in six month's time.
I suspect it is part leadership change (sundar/kurain) and over indexing on Ai for doing the job on top of a model that is just not as good (esp flash 3.5). Google Cloud / Gemini Enterprise sent me the greatest Slop Deck of all time. It was quite obvious it was Ai generated and the rep had only read a few slides of the 30+. I wonder if they are even aware after losing the sale
Its explanation: "the wasted tokens came from re-rendering the document to verify layout after a page-orientation bug."
Google is kinda famous for killing a product and replacing it with a worse one, though, so not very surprising.
> Today we’re beginning to roll out Project Tailwind with its new name: NotebookLM, an experimental offering from Google Labs. It’s our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core: hence the LM.
It's funny how similar that article's intro is to today's announcement.
[0] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/notebook...
Large model?
Learning machine?
This might be the one time I might forgive it but guys please don't it's annoying.
There's a lot of these in their sub.
Is there something out there that will do this? I'm sure the right harness around frontier models would make it work.
Feel free to email if you have any questions or feedback.
Can pronounce math is the real showstopper for me. Last time I tried, NotebookLM would try to say the TeX out loud. Like underscore dollarsign...