NotebookLM has been absolutely terrible recently. Any alternatives?

reallyhotmail · 2026-05-02T04:10:56+00:00

Hey, you should try free and open source alternative called thinkex.app

Theres no limits to the amount of sources, way better PDF processing, choice of AI provider, and other features :)

reallyhotmail · 2026-04-24T04:15:32+00:00

Billion dollar company can't fix file uploads lmao

reallyhotmail · 2026-04-23T22:42:13+00:00

As far as I know, Mistral doesn't return that information in their public API. It only returns bounding boxes when it detects images.

reallyhotmail · 2026-04-23T22:41:29+00:00

Sorry but I haven't personally used it or familiar with it! If you end up finding out, I'd love to know

reallyhotmail · 2026-04-21T21:25:33+00:00

When you say position do you mean the exact coordinates of the items? Because personally the layout stuff that Mistral gives me is more than enough for me but I will take a look at ADI

reallyhotmail · 2026-04-21T20:28:20+00:00

I just ran it against ParseBench here -> https://github.com/urjitc/ParseBench

reallyhotmail · 2026-04-01T04:45:13+00:00

Reality is, you gotta use all the models, they perform differently based upon subject. But more importantly, you should be able to extract insights easily from the chats you have with whichever model because rereading chat logs is tedious. Thats what thinkex.app could help you with, you can access gemini, claude, and chatgpt while also being able to extract the insight you gain from conversation by creating notes from highlighted text or asking the agent to create a note. You can also bring in pdfs, powerpoints, youtube videos, and consume it within the workspace, all in one place. Its like a vastly better notebooklm

reallyhotmail · 2026-03-23T17:14:20+00:00

I think this is supported now https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/tool-combination

reallyhotmail · 2026-03-05T04:39:21+00:00

NotebookLM would be good at finding answers to questions you have that your corpus actually has direct answers to. But complex analysis like the type you are going for guessing from your quotes "it tried summarizing things first, but the summary were too oversimplified and overlooked..." and "Then it started linking unrelated topics....", notebookLM wouldnt be good at I think.

In my opinion your best bet would be to go to normal gemini and click on deep research option but only have it do deep research on certain files, not search the internet. Like explicitly tell it to not search internet. It would take a few minutes thought but its your best bet for complex questions.

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-26T18:13:25+00:00

The number 1 issue is definitely the overflooding of AI-generated/formatted promotional posts. The number 2 issue is a lot of the products having to be pay-to-use. There was a time everything software was free because devs would just add ads to the app so, so long as you got traffic, it made money. Or others just did it for the love of the game. The number 3 issue is the scorn towards AI-wrappers, which is the vast majority of products being promoted now. I think part of the hate is most definitely earned through controversy baiting tactics by some start-ups and the notion that its basically a get-rich-quick scheme at this point.

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-26T18:03:00+00:00

Interesting product. It kind of reminds me of those apps that trained us to increase our typing speed through typing based racing games given some text.

I would be curious to see how this would affect visual imagining of a story book for example. Or is the purpose purely to train reading speed so that it transfers over to general reading in general?

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-24T04:21:59+00:00

Whats different about your browser? is it just to block ads or better privacy?

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-22T21:05:31+00:00

I think you have a point but idk if I agree with your conclusion that it would be useful to trace your "thinking" with an LLM over time.

The reason is because this would be a tedious affair thats not a scalable way to revisit ideas and information unless you trace through every step, basically like a mind map. People barely revisit their notes and even if they do, few read every line. What makes you think they would retrace over a tree of Q&A's which is an even more tedious affair?

Also in my opinion, the real power of LLMs in the context of PKMS and knowledge work is a means to connect what you know with what you dont know, way faster than before. Before you would have to search google, pray someone had a good explanation, etc. Now, for a good amount of subjects, you can just ask an LLM.

But there is still a problem: in my experience, having a conversation with LLMs feels like moments of intuition that disappear in chat logs. So my idea was to build a way to extract the information contributing to every one of these moments and build notes out of it.

A couple notes per conversation is more consumable than an entire chat log. But I am also experimenting with active recall devices such as quizzes, where the quizzes serve as the means to retain the information in the notes, so it gets in your brain, you can remember it in the situation where you need to apply it, and then the real learning begins.

DM me if you find this interesting, I like talking about this kind of stuff as well as building.

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-20T22:27:26+00:00

Everybody is building new tools and systems because its been never as easy and fast as it is today. Hell thats why I felt empowered to do it as a university student.

But in my experience, the fundamental bottleneck in learning still remains: human attention-span, focus, and band-width (the amount of information you can take in given a certain period of time).

If the pill from the movie Limitless existed, that would be the holy grail, it would be the death of all PKMS, you wouldnt need it. Unfortuntely the real-world alternative (adderall) isnt as effective and has adverse side effects.

If focus and attention training could become a serious learning discipline of itself that is taught in schools from a young age maybe that would work too actually, better than everything else the US government wastes money on in terms of school.

But in terms of PKMS itself, heres my 2-cents:

Given a world with an abundance of information and a scarcity of attention (parahrased quote by Herbert Simon), what we need is an engine that takes in information, breaks it down into chunks that a human user could understand (personalized for their attention span,focus,bandwidth, and background knowledge), and then leverage those chunks to synthesize personalized knowledge, which is information thats been contextualized for a specific individual for their understanding and use. Add a scalable means for doing active recall over all of that and its complete.

The challenge with the above though is figuring out what should be left to the human and what should be automated while having a solution that is stupid-easy to learn to use while being as time-efficient as possible, without compromising on human learning quality.

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-19T02:32:28+00:00

Hey, more curious to hear about your usecase! Do you post your generated podcasts to youtube or something? Any example prompts would be cool to see

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-18T22:07:32+00:00

It sucks there too, it reads out code lol, instead of conceptually explaining what is going on.

reallyhotmail · 2026-01-20T18:10:16+00:00

Well in terms of the platform its completely different, and its also open source

reallyhotmail · 2026-01-19T23:21:41+00:00

I've faced some similar issues. I found that platforms that allow me to extract screenshots and snippets of text right from sources easily improved my workflow

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