Open Notebook: Your Local, Flexible Take on Notebook LM

If you've been curious about AI-powered research assistants like Google's Notebook LM but wished for more control and fewer restrictions, there's a new open-source project you should know about. It brings the core concept of a conversational document analysis tool right to your own machine, with the freedom to tweak and extend it as you see fit.

This isn't just a clone; it's a developer's take on the idea, built to be more flexible and feature-rich for those who like to get their hands dirty with the code.

What It Does

Open Notebook is a local, open-source implementation of the Notebook LM concept. At its heart, it's a web application that lets you upload documents—PDFs, text files, Word docs—and then have a conversation with an AI about their content. The AI can answer questions, summarize sections, and connect ideas across your uploaded sources, all based solely on the text you provide. It keeps your data local, using Ollama to run open-source LLMs like Llama 3.1 or Mistral directly on your computer.

Why It's Cool

The real appeal here is the flexibility. Since it's open source, you're not locked into a specific AI model or cloud service. You can swap out the backend LLM, customize the UI, or integrate it into your own workflows. The project is built with a clear, modern stack (Next.js, Tailwind, LangChain) that many developers will find familiar and easy to modify.

It also adds some thoughtful features beyond the basic premise. You can manage multiple "notebooks" for different projects, and the system maintains a clean separation between your document context and the AI's instructions. This gives you more precision than a simple chat-with-a-document tool. It feels less like a demo and more like a usable, extensible piece of software for serious research or content analysis.

How to Try It

Getting started is straightforward if you're comfortable with a local dev setup. You'll need Node.js, Ollama, and a few minutes to clone and run the project.

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/lfnovo/open-notebook.git
   cd open-notebook
   

2. Install dependencies:

   npm install
   

3. Set up Ollama: Make sure you have Ollama installed and running. Then, pull a model (the default in the project is llama3.1):

   ollama pull llama3.1
   

4. Run the development server:

   npm run dev
   

5. Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser, and you're ready to start uploading documents and asking questions.

For the full setup details, including environment variables and model configuration, check the project's README.

Final Thoughts

Open Notebook hits a sweet spot for developers. It takes a compelling product idea and delivers it as a hackable, local-first project. It's perfect if you're analyzing codebases, reviewing a batch of research papers, or just want to experiment with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) applications without sending sensitive data to a third-party API. The code is clean and well-structured, making it a great learning resource or a solid foundation to build your own tailored research assistant.

It's projects like these that remind you how powerful the open-source model can be—taking a good idea and making it accessible, private, and infinitely customizable.

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