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.
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"
I wondered when the name change was coming because this is Google: products be endlessly repackaged and renamed, some only to be killed later.
I reckon the same dipshits responsible for Microsoft’s product naming in the early 2000s all moved on to Google to wreak the same havoc there.
Looking at the recent decades-old-brand renaming bonanza with MS Office I'm pretty sure they're still in Redmond.
Banana Paper was on the shortlist
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.
Google:
- Hangout
- Chat
- Meets
- Duo
- ...
Allo?
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?
Not a big deal to be honest. Still works just as great.
Very, very, very excited to hopefully stop getting support emails at Notebook.ai for people trying to get help with NotebookLM.
Gemini Notebook is a way better name for the masses.
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?
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.
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. I never had a lot of confidence in his leadership. It's one thing to have internally competing things, but that shouldn't be exposed to end users.
Why? tho
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.
I was using Gemini for one thing, the CLI, and suddenly that started refusing to run, telling me to install Antigravity instead. I think that's the IDE, or maybe they have a CLI version too, either way too late I'm gone now. Don't break the thing I was 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.
> Google has some serious internal problems.
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).
Yeah, it grinds my gears. They could probably have lightning speed inference and the best model if they were interested in doing so.
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!
Because naming every product "Copilot" is going so well for Microsoft, I guess?
But they renamed Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI. And it's worse.
It's not just a rename, they broke the old one.
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 ?
The backend has changed people experience more hallucinations. You can see their subs.
I was never sure what the "LM" stood for, so this makes sense to me.
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.
[0] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/notebook...
Language model?
Large model?
Learning machine?
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.
NorebookLM sounded a little scholastic
If it's named "Gemini", does that mean it's going to get shoved in your face on every single google-related page/product?
They probably changed the name because they've been integrating it with the Gemini web page where it now appears on the left above recent chats.
Are there other tools out there like NotebookLM? Not a replacement but some cool AI tools that help people learn.
Best closest I stumble on is nouswise. Lets you contain an agent with even more sources and generate almost all outputs.
Like how many sources? And what you mean by sources (tables pdfs...)?
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.
Or maybe just a way to use chatgpt/Claude with files , and get accurate references to the page/paragraph in the source?
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.
It's cumbersome to have llm duplicate all quotes and still get good response. Else you get no visibility into your sources.
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.
How would the right format for you look like? Specially be monologue?
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.
Readwise does this pretty well.
random idea -- driving while you drive?
1) you aren't able to listen to something safely while driving on the highway? 2) the cars pretty much drive themselves on the highway these days
Company run by consultants and MBAs.
In a few years, https://killedbygoogle.com/
Next step, monitize every pixel, result and second into adveristing placement
Oh wow, this is a great idea. Can I ask what your prompt looks like?