r/notebooklm

I don't know if anyone else was doing this but I used to spend entire weekends just dumping books into NotebookLM, like one weekend I'd go down some rabbit hole with Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Saltykov Shchedrin, maybe throw in Zola or Hugo, and the next be Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, whatever.

And after listening to the podcasts, the little video explainers, the fun part was getting all these people into the same conversation. Anybody else create author debates that would go on for hours?

Anyway I hadn't opened NotebookLM in a few months and went back today and what the f*** happened to this thing, why am I suddenly being asked to pay all this money?

I understand the data centers use electricity and all that but I have a pretty hard time believing the actual computing costs justify what these companies are charging. I'm looking at you Higgsfield. Artficial scarcity creating a******s

So I just started college and have been trying to find a tool that genuinely helps me learn without a bunch of fluff

No matter what major tool I use, claude, chat, notebooklm, it just over informs me or gives me the answer immediately instead of helping me learn. i feel like analogies or real world answers would be great, but also not having to be so intent on opening a website to have a single place for all my learning. like something that is a second brain for learning, or my personalized tutor

Half the time these tools dont even remember what I learned

Since September 2 the old fixed caps (50 chats a day on free, 3 Audio Overviews, and so on) are gone. Everything now draws from one compute budget that refills every 5 hours, up to a weekly ceiling. I had a bunch of questions about how it works, so here's what Google's help page and the settings screen actually answer.

What counts against it? Google lists four things: how complex the prompt is, how long the chat is, how many sources are involved, and which features you use. A quick factual question and a synthesis across 40 sources aren't "one chat" each anymore.

Do chat and Studio share it? Yes. Chat, Audio Overviews, Video Overviews and Deep Research all come out of the same pool. A long video overview in the morning can be why chat runs out in the afternoon.

Where do I see what's left? Settings > Usage shows your current balance and when the weekly limit resets.

What happens when I run out? Two different things, depending on which clock ran out. If you hit the 5-hour window, it comes back the same day. If you hit the weekly limit, it doesn't. For Studio outputs there's now a "Generate later" option on the web that queues the job until there's budget again.

How do paid plans compare? Google gives multipliers, not numbers: Plus is 2x the free allowance, Pro 4x, Ultra 5x to 20x. Nobody outside Google knows what 1x actually is.

What actually stretches it, based on those four factors:

Untick the sources you don't need for a question. The number of sources is on Google's own list, and most questions only need two or three out of the whole notebook.

Clear the chat when you change topics. Chat length counts, so one chat that runs all week gets more expensive with every question.

Ask one detailed question instead of five follow-ups. Each follow-up drags the whole chat along with it.

Do Studio outputs last, or queue them with Generate later. Then a big overview can't eat the budget you needed for chat.

Fewer, cleaner sources help too. When I bring in AI chats as sources, I export the whole conversation as one Markdown file with AI Toolbox, the extension I build, instead of pasting it in as a pile of separate text sources. It's one source and it reads in order.

Break that down for me.

Hi, I'm a working student still learning about how this works to help me catch up with school while juggling between jobs.

For my current concern, I want to focus on 1 source only, and i already have the syllabus/pointers given by the professor.

I got the advice that I have to make a study map.. But what if I already have a map to follow? What prompt should I use to be able to extract all relevant information from my 1 source? Do i just select the desired source and outrightly ask to "discuss" a specific topic?

I would appreciate it if anyone could give advice/tricks/prompts that might help me. Thanks in advance.

I haven't had time to really listen to any of my recently generated audios. But previewing one briefly I thought it sounded more natural again. If anything maybe someday a hybrid of the old and new, but acceptable as far as I could tell.