LaptopLM easy mine favorite AI tooland it has practically no competitors. But there are one or two contenders for his throne. First, Microsoft has its own answer to NotebookLM, locked under the Copilot license. And there is another impressive project that is private and not owned by a major tech company. Enter Open notepad.
NotebookLM is an “artificial intelligence research tool,” as Google calls it, but its flexibility allows it to be called many names. It does a great job of breaking down complex topics into enjoyable, easy-to-understand information, making it ideal for study, work, or creative brainstorming. To start, you provide your sources, such as documents, plain text, or web links. NotebookLM will analyze them and use the information to create audio summaries, flash cards, and more. The best part is that it will generate outputs and responses based only on your sources, so the chances of providing false information or hallucinatory responses are reduced.
Open Notebook is a free, open-source project by Louis Noris that can do much of what NotebookLM can do, with an emphasis on privacy. You can even run Open Notebook with a local AI model if you want, or choose from popular chatbot options like ChatGPT, Claude and others.
But one thing to note is that the Open Notebook setup isn't for everyone. This can be especially difficult for those who have a “sign in and sign out” expectation, as is the case with NotebookLM. If you're not already familiar with the requirements, and there are many, you may run into trouble before you even start using Open Notebook. However, the fact that Open Notebook exists says a lot about NotebookLM itself and the desire to create a more privacy-focused version of the product. What Open Notebook lacks in refinement, it makes up for in flexibility and features that you simply won't (and likely won't) get with NotebookLM anytime soon.
The installation sometimes felt like tuning.
I'm a self-proclaimed tinkerer, but installing Open Notebook has tripped me up a few times. You'll need a program called Docker to set up the container and some Linux know-how to make it work. While I'm good enough with Linux to break things, Docker and containers were new to me and that was a sore point in this process.
If you're not familiar with setting up containers or Linux, this will likely be a daunting task, even with the helpful getting started guide. I still needed help from a developer to get everything working properly. The crashes you experience may also depend on the operating system you want to run Open Notebook on. I used Windows, but MacOS is obviously easier to get started with.
If everything is set up correctly, you can access Open Notebook via a web browser, just as with NotebookLM, although there is no mobile app equivalent. Then you will need to configure the model you want to use. For me it was also an adventure, but the manual and the Open Notebook Discord community might be helpful if you're stuck like I was.
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Open Notepad: Highlights
Open Notebook is for those looking for a more private and flexible alternative to NotebookLM. Despite the speed of Google's development of this proposal, we can assume that some Open Notebook proposals will never appear in NotebookLM for a number of reasons.
Launch Local LLMs
NotebookLM is a cloud-based application, like other Google products. This means that your data is always sent to the server and back to your computer. Open Notebook fixes this problem by allowing you to install local LLMs use to have your interactions saved on your device. Not only does this improve data privacy, but since the entire AI model is installed on your device, you don't rely on the Internet to get the answer.
Add sources to multiple notebooks
Sources are everything for tools like NotebookLM and Open Notebook, and sometimes a single source can belong to multiple notebooks. At the moment, sources in NotebookLM are strictly limited to a single notebook, but Open Notebook allows you to immediately select which notebooks you want to add a source to. On the other hand, you can only add one source at a time. Earlier this year, Google introduced the ability to add multiple sources at once to NotebookLM.
“Search and Ask” in your knowledge base
Every time you add a source to Open Notebook, it becomes part of your knowledge base, going beyond any specific notebook you create. You can also search the entire knowledge base for specific keywords or “ask” selected LLM questions based on your knowledge base sources.
Look at the transformations
You can think of transformations as text outputs in the NotebookLM Studio panel. You can select options such as a detailed summary, article analysis, reflections, key ideas, and more. There's even a Playground option that allows you to try something out in a testing area before fully applying it to one of your sources.
Create your own podcasts
Audio reviews are one of the features that have gotten NotebookLM a lot of well-deserved attention. Open Notebook has its own podcast feature that gives you more control. For example, you can create individual speaker profiles and give them a personal touch, and run them individually on separate LLMs to create a dynamic podcast with different points of view. If you're not interested in creating your own speaker, there are several predefined speakers to choose from that you can use as is or duplicate and edit as you see fit.
We need a tool like Open Notebook
Much of our digital life is constantly moving to the servers of large technology companies. So being able to regain some control over this, especially with a powerful tool like Open Notebook, is a win. Whether your main concern is privacy or having more choice in AI models, Open Notebook will likely continue to get the attention it deserves and will only grow from here.
