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.

• citiguy

  today at 6:59 PM

  Oh wow, this is a great idea. Can I ask what your prompt looks like?

  • d4rkp4ttern

    today at 7:07 PM

    Me:

        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:

    https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...

    • mandeepj

      today at 8:51 PM

      To each their own, but for me - that'd be a heavy cognitive load. I ask Claude or ChatGPT to summarize HN comments and the article and provide any takeaways or wisdom nuggets. That's it.

    • singhkays

      today at 8:49 PM

      thanks for sharing! saving this to refer back to this

• lardosaurusrex

  today at 7:46 PM

  >hack

  >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.

  • estearum

    today at 8:37 PM

    This may come as a surprise, but some people have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy.

    • doctorpangloss

      today at 8:52 PM

      what do you think will come of the people who have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy, if the AI is ingesting large amounts of information for them?

      and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about?

      why be snarky? i agree, your AI is going to make the tedium in your job easier.

      • estearum

        today at 8:56 PM

        Probably nothing good, but that's not the complaint being leveled!

        > and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about?

        I don't see evidence of that?

  • pmarreck

    today at 8:53 PM

    you must be this guy

    https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&...

• pmarreck

  today at 8:50 PM

  The limit of these things being at least partially due to the users’ imagination explains at least some of the terrible criticisms I see out there which do not stand up to scrutiny. Perfect example just now in the wild: https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&...

  anyway, your idea is sweet, likely because you are smart

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"

• forkerenok

  today at 5:55 PM

  I wondered when the name change was coming because this is Google: products be endlessly repackaged and renamed, some only to be killed later.

  • dotancohen

    today at 8:23 PM

      > products be endlessly repackaged
    

    I don't speak English at home either, so I hope this helps. It's "products are", not "products be".

    • pmarreck

      today at 8:55 PM

      i’m thinking it’s an intentional turn of phrase

      so for example in native English, if someone upset some people, you might say, just to be creatively different:

      “oh boy. people be big mad”

      it is an idiom, not necessarily officially part of the language. just saying things in a silly way to be different

      “now you’ve done it… People be cryin’!”

  • mattkevan

    today at 6:37 PM

    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.

    • tapoxi

      today at 7:00 PM

      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.

      The latest console is the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X

      • eterm

        today at 7:30 PM

        I thought that was satire but I've googled it and you're not even joking.

      • ramses0

        today at 8:33 PM

        ...and the Ally ISN'T EVEN AN XBOX!!!!

        """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"""

    • iamacyborg

      today at 7:37 PM

      No, no, they’ve all moved over to Salesforce.

    • jkkola

      today at 6:51 PM

      Looking at the recent decades-old-brand renaming bonanza with MS Office I'm pretty sure they're still in Redmond.

• stabbles

  today at 6:38 PM

  Banana Paper was on the shortlist

• nicce

  today at 7:18 PM

  Bard was a great name.

  • today at 8:06 PM

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?

• mayneack

  today at 8:46 PM

  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.

• agloe_dreams

  today at 6:29 PM

  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.

  • frollogaston

    today at 6:54 PM

    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.

• frollogaston

  today at 6:52 PM

  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.

  • kridsdale1

    today at 7:32 PM

    Jetski is a code name.

    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.

    • frollogaston

      today at 8:02 PM

      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.

• today at 6:50 PM

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.

• iAMkenough

  today at 7:24 PM

  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.

• today at 5:31 PM

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

- ...

• adamm255

  today at 8:05 PM

  Wave. That was more of a tech preview though I guess.

• ambicapter

  today at 7:53 PM

  The new chat interface in google meets is hilariously bad. Doesn't even load half the time.

• electriclove

  today at 6:12 PM

  Allo?

  • frollogaston

    today at 6:47 PM

    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.

• thornewolf

  today at 7:02 PM

  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).

  [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

• tokioyoyo

  today at 8:47 PM

  My wild guess is Google isn’t willing to play as dirty as the others wrt data acquisition.

• frollogaston

  today at 6:57 PM

  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.

• speak_plainly

  today at 5:53 PM

  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.

  • verdverm

    today at 6:14 PM

    > 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

• dwa3592

  today at 5:53 PM

  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.

  • lern_too_spel

    today at 6:42 PM

    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.

    • ceroxylon

      today at 7:47 PM

      Fable in Cowork can get stuck in loops, I've had a single prompt use 83% of a session quota on a single prompt before I realized something was amiss.

      Its explanation: "the wasted tokens came from re-rendering the document to verify layout after a page-orientation bug."

  • SwellJoe

    today at 5:58 PM

    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).

• shellfishgene

  today at 5:54 PM

  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!

• copperx

  today at 5:41 PM

  Yeah, it grinds my gears. They could probably have lightning speed inference and the best model if they were interested in doing so.

Incredible how I have not touched a singled AI thing from google for.. probably well over a year at this point. Amazing.

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.

Because naming every product "Copilot" is going so well for Microsoft, I guess?

• operatingthetan

  today at 6:42 PM

  But they renamed Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI. And it's worse.

  • SwellJoe

    today at 7:01 PM

    That's not a rename, though, Antigravity is a new product.

    Google is kinda famous for killing a product and replacing it with a worse one, though, so not very surprising.

    • operatingthetan

      today at 7:04 PM

      I should have said replace.

  • frollogaston

    today at 6:58 PM

    It's not just a rename, they broke the old one.

    • VectorLock

      today at 8:37 PM

      Not even just broke, they completely disabled people's ability to use it. Took it out behind the woodshed.

I was never sure what the "LM" stood for, so this makes sense to me.

• annjose

  today at 5:58 PM

  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...

• BrokenCogs

  today at 5:55 PM

  Language model?

  Large model?

  Learning machine?

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 ?

• hek2sch

  today at 6:14 PM

  The backend has changed people experience more hallucinations. You can see their subs.

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.

• frollogaston

  today at 7:13 PM

  They've been doing this kind of thing for at least 15 years

NorebookLM sounded a little scholastic

NotebookLM is genuinely useful for structured research workflows. My concern is not the name. It's whether the "notebook" metaphor survives the rebrand.

If it's named "Gemini", does that mean it's going to get shoved in your face on every single google-related page/product?

• SecretDreams

  today at 5:36 PM

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxYUizQrAg8&t=4s

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.

Not a big deal to be honest. Still works just as great.

• realsarm

  today at 7:04 PM

  Technically not https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1ss53l5/halluci...

  There's a lot of these in their sub.

Are there other tools out there like NotebookLM? Not a replacement but some cool AI tools that help people learn.

• petra

  today at 5:26 PM

  Or maybe just a way to use chatgpt/Claude with files , and get accurate references to the page/paragraph in the source?

  • jeromegv

    today at 5:48 PM

    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.

  • hek2sch

    today at 5:38 PM

    It's cumbersome to have llm duplicate all quotes and still get good response. Else you get no visibility into your sources.

• hek2sch

  today at 5:36 PM

  Best closest I stumble on is nouswise. Lets you contain an agent with even more sources and generate almost all outputs.

  • petra

    today at 8:51 PM

    No pricing, "call for demo". Not sure this is for personal use.

  • realsarm

    today at 6:17 PM

    Like how many sources? And what you mean by sources (tables pdfs...)?

    • hek2sch

      today at 6:22 PM

      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.

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.

• goldenjm

  today at 6:32 PM

  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.

• hek2sch

  today at 6:26 PM

  How would the right format for you look like? Specially be monologue?

  • NoImmatureAdHom

    today at 6:34 PM

    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...

    • hek2sch

      today at 6:49 PM

      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.

• larrywright

  today at 5:53 PM

  Readwise does this pretty well.

• mistrial9

  today at 5:45 PM

  random idea -- driving while you drive?

  • today at 6:01 PM

  • NoImmatureAdHom

    today at 6:32 PM

    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

Why? tho

Company run by consultants and MBAs.

big news

Sure it’s not “Gemini AI Pro Max Duo Notebooks for Workspace Personal”? /s

In a few years, https://killedbygoogle.com/

• delduca

  today at 7:02 PM

  Years? :-)

Next step, monitize every pixel, result and second into adveristing placement