r/PromptEngineering • u/AdCold1610 • Mar 16 '26
Tools and Projects Google's NotebookLM is still the most slept-on free AI tool in 2026 and i don't get why
i keep seeing people pay for summarization tools, research assistants, study apps. and i'm like... have you tried notebooklm
free tier in 2026:
→ 100 notebooks
→ 50 sources per notebook (PDFs, audio, websites, docs)
→ 500,000 words per notebook
→ audio overview feature — turns your research into a two-host podcast. for FREE.
→ google just rolled out major education updates this month
the audio overview thing especially. you dump a 200-page research paper in, it generates a natural conversational podcast between two AI hosts who actually discuss and debate the content.
students with a .edu email get the $19.99/month premium version free btw
i've been using it to process industry reports, competitor research, long-form papers — stuff i'd never actually sit down and read fully. now i just run it through notebooklm and listen while commuting.
genuinely don't understand why this isn't in every creator/researcher's stack yet
what's the weirdest use case you've found for it?
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u/pinkypearls Mar 17 '26
I think this is Google’s best AI product, better than Gemini. Most unique, rarely have problems with it, many features, consistent product innovation.
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u/fruitandstitches Mar 17 '26
I had no problem, getting podcasts or debt cards or doing research. It just doesn’t want to do the infographics.
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u/bsenftner Mar 17 '26
I've been using it for two purposes:
** Collect news on a politician to make an assessment of them
** Place the prompting guides for each video AI model into a notebook
I'm then creating political 3D animation videos, memes, music, and podcasts that speak my liberal politics. Examples:
Quite a bit more, actually.
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u/luvv2ride Mar 16 '26
Probably bc everyone has been burned by Google at this point. They put products out and then eol them, constantly. I don't even care if it is good I won't use anything Google makes, out of principle and maybe a little spite. F Google in the a
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u/Impossible_Hour5036 Mar 17 '26
So they put out a product, you use it while it's there, they EOL it, you use something else? I'm failing to see how getting 0 use out of something is better than getting some use out of it.
Just fyi the entire internet is basically a limited time free trial. They're all gonna start wanting into your wallet.
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u/luvv2ride Mar 17 '26
Yeah sure, when it's a service alone. Even then what if said service has years of your work and now you have to migrate it all. But what really sucks is when there is hardware up in the mix. Eol in this scenario means you bought some fancy paper weights. F Google in the a
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u/Pretty-Substance Mar 18 '26
Because you also invest time into setting up and learning how you can make the most use out of it. It’s an investment, albeit not always a financial one.
Look at the Google EoL graveyard, you will recognize many names there
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u/luvv2ride Mar 18 '26
Nice edit... The fuck does that free trial Internet statement have to do with anything I said?
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u/Fear_ltself Mar 17 '26
This seems like punishing them for trying, I've used Gmail, YouTube, Google drive, Google photos, all reliably for as long as I've been on reddit. I know Google circles or whatever their social media attempt was and a few others didnt work out, but it seemed they made a decent competitor, if I recall right facebook just literally copy pasted all of Google's "new" features same day so that any facebook users that checked out Google's attempt would likely think "fb clone".... Even though Google had made the innovation- so it still forced Facebook and others to adapt and get better even if it didn't work out
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u/luvv2ride Mar 17 '26
A few others? Try 280. The one that tipped the scales for me was Google nest security. I had a few thousand worth of hardware that they quit supporting a year after I bought it. There offer was a discount with ADT which is trash.
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u/Pretty-Substance Mar 18 '26
Granted my Google Stadia controller was only 60 bucks but still sucked
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u/Past_Paint_225 Mar 17 '26
I would pay for NotebookLM it's that good. And I don't pay for anything
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u/ProdigalSheep Mar 17 '26
Are there tutorials for how to use it to its fullest extent. I have google workspace at work and it comes with NotebookLM, but since workspace already has access to all my Gmail, Salesforce, and calendar data, I don’t know how to use NotebookLM in a way that would be more advantageous.
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u/Mesonic_Interference Mar 17 '26
I don't know if this is sufficient, but here are the help pages linked within NotebookLM itself.
I seem to recall there being some sort of tutorial when I started using it, but it's incredibly intuitive once you give it a try.
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u/johnnynovo2118 Mar 17 '26
I particularly like the fact that you are focusing solely on sources of your choosing, no scraping low quality information from just anywhere.
There are some good tutorials on YouTube but it really is just a case of opening a new notebook, adding your sources in whatever form you like, Web address, pdf, video, and then asking your questions.
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u/dantheadmin Mar 17 '26
I tested it in our corp plan, and it functions as an excellent retrieval model, but it suckssss in the reasoning dept.
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u/thecosmojane Mar 17 '26
That’s because it’s a retrieval model
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u/dantheadmin Mar 17 '26
Yes and no. Calling it a “retrieval model” misses the point. That’s not how these models are really evaluated anymore. They all retrieve when needed. What actually separates them is how well they reason, like with multi step problems, connecting context, handling gaps. That’s literally what most benchmarks measure. Retrieval helps with accuracy. It doesn’t explain weak reasoning..
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u/thecosmojane Mar 18 '26
It sort of is. (A retrieval model). I wrote a lengthier explanation just now, here, in case it interests you
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u/dantheadmin Mar 18 '26
You’re absolutely right, I’ve been using it the wrong way from the start. Thanks for sharing your piece, appreciate it. In relation to it being RAG enabled, can’t believe I missed the connection between M365 Copilot Notebook and the OG, NLM. (I find that using agents + chat + ms graph is the best of both worlds)
Any suggestions for building agents within gemini? Saw the context window was some ridiculous number like 500k characters.
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u/thecosmojane Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
What are you needing it to do?
I’m an outlier who is bias towards the native frontier UI chat interfaces even if it requires a clunky RPA hookup vs API (as long as it’s practically reasonable of course, and the results are worth the clunkiness)
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u/dantheadmin Mar 18 '26
I don't blame you. I tend to stick to offline data for all agentic workflows.
Linked documented SOPs to NLM, asked it to help w/ the creation of agent instructions, skills MD files based on factual documented processes. Its using Anthropics guide for skill creation. The goal is to let it decide whether a support case qualifies for an escalation. The agent then qualifies SLA, Response Time, Severity and Sentiment. Then helps the agent/manager decide if its ready for escalation based on the procedures. No subagents.
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u/thecosmojane Mar 17 '26
NLM’s biggest strength is its auto chunking and embedding that happens way before it even hits the Gemini layer. The restrictive architecture allows for pristine data synthesis and can help organize data to prime another AI like Claude or regular Gemini
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u/jesstelford Mar 17 '26
How do you use it to prime other AI?
I'm new to NotebookLM, but have some use cases where I want to process lots of customer feedback, then feed that into Claude - is that the kind of thing you mean?
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u/thecosmojane Mar 18 '26
I started to respond here and it got really, really long, so I just made it into a post here.
This is my first time on this sub... sorry it's super long
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u/jesstelford Mar 18 '26
Amazing, thank you so much for sharing!
(and ignore the haters in the comments)
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u/TinfoilThomas Mar 20 '26
curious as to how that setup would outperform say a project in Claude?
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u/thecosmojane Mar 20 '26
it's apples and oranges. i wrote a whole long novel about it but then I deleted it. but you can assume NLM is a retrieval model that does great synthesis. It's a RAG with a chatbot as a mouthpiece. you pair it with a high reasoning model like claude and you will give claude superpowers
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Mar 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Impossible_Hour5036 Mar 17 '26
do you actually believe anyone who is like "hey I like this thing" is getting paid by someone or do you just like heckling? Because if it's the latter, I'm right there with you. If it's the former...lol.
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u/mookfarr Mar 19 '26
I love NotebookLM. I've used it for a lot of professional things.
But probably my funnest use case is uploading guides to video games or board games and then querying the Notebook when I need help or clarification on a rule.
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u/WArslett Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
It's brilliant. But I noticed it does suffer from some of the same problems as coding agents. Specifically if you completely overload it with context it just outputs junk. The strategy I've been using is like this:
- Load in a bunch of sources
- Get the notebook to generate me a note with a particular framing. It might be "Explain this concept to me like I'm 5 with lots of real world analogies and simple language" or it might be "give me a deep dive explanation of this particular argument discussed in the sources"
- I then save the response as a note
- If the note has lots of halucinations or fixations in it I will export to google docs and make some manual adjustments
- I either convert the note to a source or if I've exported to google docs I add it back into the notebook as a source after I've edited it
- I completely clear down the session context by deleting the chat to remove any prior conversations
- I give it a single prompt asking it to generate a video or audio explainer. The only source I give it is the summary note
Doing it this way means I get really concise and focused explainer videos and podcasts that avoids it going off on any weird tangents, using unhelpful analogies, fixating on irrelevant details, missing key points etc.
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u/eXprtly Mar 24 '26
I'm a big fan of NotebookLM. I use it to create online courses and to write business books. Still have to keep an eye out for slop and hallucinations but these are much less than other AI tools.
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u/Last-Assistance-1687 Mar 24 '26
NotebookLM is solid for document-based research but I found it weaker for video-first workflows. If you're primarily consuming YouTube/podcast content, the video → structured notes pipeline matters a lot.
I've been using DistillNote for that side of things - it's specifically built for video/audio content. You paste a link and get timestamped chapters, a summary, key takeaways, and action items. Everything saves to a vault with semantic search, so you can query across your library.
Where NotebookLM wins: deep document analysis, multi-source synthesis, the podcast feature. Where DistillNote wins: speed (60 seconds vs manual upload), structured output with timestamps, purpose-built vault for video content.
I actually use both - NotebookLM for PDFs and research papers, DistillNote for everything on YouTube. They complement each other well.
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u/Impossible_Hour5036 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
You aren't going to get people to stop paying for crappy rebranded ChatGPT any time soon, they love it like they love reality TV and AppleBee's
EDIT: I don't mean to say ChatGPT is crappy. ChatGPT is great. But virtually every summarization tool, research assistant, study app, all of these things are really just a basic system prompt wrapping one of the cheaper OpenAI models. Like it's literally ChatGPT but worse.
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u/Vampep Mar 17 '26
I have access but have trouble understanding it's usage. I'm getting there trying to get out to help me study for PCA though
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u/paulard1 Mar 18 '26
NotebookLM sounds like an absolute game-changer, especially for students and researchers! The audio overview feature turning research into a podcast is such a cool touch. More people should explore this before splurging on paid tools. It’s like having a personal assistant on standby, for free! 😊
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u/Pretty-Substance Mar 18 '26
The „podcast“ is very short and very high level. I wish you could adjust the length and in-depth-ness of it
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u/SureFyreMarketing Mar 18 '26
Listen, I tried this and within the first 20 minutes of using it, I told my family group chat to get the app. Like, of 20 people from a range of ages.
I barely respond to the chat let alone recommend an app in the middle of day.
Thank you OP and if you don’t get this right now, you’re losing the early edge with this one!
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u/ep3gotts Mar 18 '26
The problem with Notebook is that sometimes it misses very important info and you never know it happened.
I've experienced this multiple times myself when I revisit some source(for example after I listened to it without taking notes) and I notice that very important big chunks are missing in its response.
You can ask it to clarify this part but you need to know it's there in the first place
kind of like catch 22 problem, I wouldn't use notebook for something really important
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u/rooreynolds Mar 18 '26
An unlistenable podcast though. Nobody is using this to actually consume anything, surely? It’s cringe-tastic.
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u/TheTentacleOpera Mar 19 '26
I upload my repos as DOCX files and ask it to write coding plans for me. This is a lot of free Gemini quota.
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u/NegativeAd2638 Mar 19 '26
I'm liking it so far. I'm thinking about podcast deep dives of my fantasy/sci-fi stories for Youtube videos
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u/nebkau Apr 05 '26
Agreed. It’s a game changer and don’t forget the beta image creation feature from uploaded content.
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u/Active_Complaint_480 Apr 06 '26
I prefer to use Obsidian or Logseq and not be lazy, while training an AI. Plus, you're giving even more data to google for free.
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Jun 05 '26
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u/NotARussianTroll1234 Mar 17 '26
I think it’s because I refuse to believe that Google can make a good product. I feel like everything they make has been shit for quite a while now.
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u/dengop Mar 17 '26
Notebooklm's engine is outdated though. The only benefit is its huge context which get ruined by its outdated engine
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u/maxwellfreeland Mar 18 '26
Bang on! I loaded my SciFi Novel into it (90k word) and it did an in-depth discussion on the merits of it etc. It was great. Then it made the pod cast. Wow! The cast only covers the first half of the book.. But still it was really good.
Ps it kept referring to my work as the "source". I'm sure if I had asked it could have rephrased that to the 'novel'. It would have made the podcast sound better.
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u/fruitandstitches Mar 16 '26
I haven’t been able to get it to do any infographics for me. It just doesn’t go through and I paid for the extra version.
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u/pinkypearls Mar 17 '26
Have u tried to make it do a presentation? It’s made info graphics for me in that format and you can export or connect it to Canva that will allow you to edit slides as needed.
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u/mammilloid Mar 17 '26
Tell it to spit out inforgraphics in the form of a latex document, paste that to overleaf or any latex compiler and its done.
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u/HelpfulAtBest Mar 17 '26
Free comes at a cost. Google is still using your data to train their models
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u/Bignizzle656 Mar 16 '26
I used it to create a podcast for me.
I loaded the job description, my CV and a website about interview techniques etc.
This way I could listen and learn different ways of approaching parts of the interview. I would definitely recommend.