If your bookmark now opens a page called Gemini Notebook, nothing is broken. Google renamed NotebookLM on 16 July and folded it more tightly into the Gemini app (Google's announcement). Then on 2 September it replaced the old daily caps with a compute budget that refills every five hours (GCN).
The core idea has not changed: you give it your sources, and it answers from them with citations. What has changed is how much each request costs you, what the audio hosts sound like, and how many people are looking at alternatives.
What actually changed
- The name. NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook. Google says it remains a standalone research product, used by more than 30 million people and 600,000 organisations (Google). The old address now redirects to notebook.google.com.
- Gemini app sync. You can open and create notebooks inside the Gemini app, and they stay in sync with the standalone product. Google says notebooks are coming to AI Mode in Search, without a date.
- A cloud computer per notebook. Each notebook is getting a sandbox where it can write and run code, so it can analyse data in your sources rather than only read them. It started with AI Ultra and some Workspace customers and is rolling out to Pro users.
- Usage limits. From 2 September, a single compute budget replaced the fixed daily counts. More on that below.
- The audio hosts. Not in any announcement, but the most visible change for many people: the Audio Overview voices changed, and threads asking for the old ones back are among the busiest on the subreddit (r/notebooklm).
How the new limits work
Under the old system, a free account got a fixed number of chats, three Audio or Video Overviews and ten reports or quizzes a day. Now every request draws on one budget. What it costs depends on how complex the prompt is, how long the chat has run, how many sources are involved and which feature you use (GCN; Android Police). The budget refills every five hours, up to a weekly ceiling.
| Plan | Budget compared with free |
|---|---|
| Free | Standard |
| Google AI Plus | 2× |
| Google AI Pro | 4× |
| Google AI Ultra | 5× or 20×, depending on the tier |
Google has not published the size of the budget itself. In practice, a quick factual question costs very little, while a Video Overview or full Slide Deck across many sources is the most expensive thing you can ask for. Studio outputs now show an expected-cost bar, and if something would go over the limit you can schedule it to run after the next refill.
Three habits stretch the budget:
- Start fresh chats. Long conversations cost more per message. Save the useful answer as a note and begin again.
- Narrow the sources. Untick the sources a question does not need. Fewer sources means a cheaper, often sharper answer.
- Draft in chat, render in Studio. Work out the structure of a slide deck or video in the chat first, then generate the expensive output once.
What regular users are saying
The subreddit has had a rough couple of months. Complaints cluster around three things: the new audio voices, Slide Deck and Infographic options that are sometimes unavailable or stuck in a queue (r/notebooklm), and answers that occasionally pull in material from outside the sources even when told not to (r/notebooklm).
The same community is also clear about what still works. A thread asking what the tool is still nailing drew teachers building worksheets and tests from their own material, and people checking long rulebooks and policies loaded as Markdown (r/notebooklm). If you use it for grounded reading and study, it remains very good at that.
Six fixes that get better answers
These come from the most useful r/notebooklm threads of the past month. Each one costs nothing.
1. Stop asking for summaries. Ask it to index the sources first, then map the questions they answer, where they agree and where they disagree (thread). Our "Map Where My Sources Disagree" prompt is ready to paste.
2. Watch which sources get cited. With 15 or more sources loaded, answers tend to cite the three or four whose wording matches your question, and miss a source that covers the same point in other words (thread). Ask for an answer per source, or use our "Check Which Sources the Notebook Is Ignoring" prompt.
3. Check your PDFs are real text. One user spent twenty minutes arguing with the tool about a section that was a scanned image (thread). If you cannot select a sentence in the PDF, run it through OCR before uploading.
4. Give the audio hosts a log, not the raw pile. Audio Overviews mix up order and credit the wrong person far less when you first ask the chat for a dated, attributed log of events, save it as a source, and generate the overview from that log alone (thread).
5. Pick topics before you make flashcards. Flashcards from a whole course pack come out as trivia. Decide in chat which topics matter for the exam, then point the quiz and flashcard tools at those (thread).
6. Clean the inputs. Tidy sources give tighter answers. One user is testing exactly this, loading raw transcripts of 126 hour-long sessions into one notebook and pre-processed question-and-answer versions into another (thread). You do not need an app for it: fixing headings, speaker names and obvious transcription errors already helps.
Alternatives worth knowing
Most people will stay. If you have material you would rather not upload to a Google account, or you are tired of the limits, three open-source projects came up repeatedly this month:
- SurfSense: a self-hostable, air-gapped option with cited answers and podcast generation. It installs like a desktop app and works with a local model or any compatible API. Its maintainer's own post is unusually honest about when it is the wrong trade (r/notebooklm).
- Open Notebook: an open-source research notebook you run yourself, with notes and custom-voice podcasts.
- Nodus Research: a free desktop app built around Zotero, answering with page-level citations. Best for academics.
All three are now in our directory: see research tools, note-taking and academic research. Our Gemini Notebook review has the full strengths and limits.
The short version
Same tool, new name, new meter. Your notebooks are where you left them. Keep chats short, untick sources you do not need, and plan the expensive Studio outputs instead of regenerating them. Ask for disagreements rather than summaries, name the sources you want checked, and make sure your PDFs contain real text. That gets more out of the free tier than most people got from the old daily caps.