Open Notebook: An Open Source Version of NotebookLM (www.open-notebook.ai)

Open Notebook is an open-source alternative to Google’s NotebookLM that positions itself as a “cognitive partner” for researchers, students, and professionals who want deeper learning, tighter privacy, and full control over their AI tooling. The release bundles a suite of note-centric features — searchable knowledge ingestion, link cataloging, customizable workflows, and a Podcast Generator that turns notes into multi‑speaker episodes with selectable voices — while emphasizing explicit controls for how data is stored and which models are used to process it. For the AI/ML community this matters because it moves a powerful, assistant-style workflow out of closed ecosystems and into an auditable, extensible space where researchers and practitioners can experiment with model choice, integration patterns, and privacy-preserving deployments. Technically, Open Notebook’s approach enables reproducibility, local or self‑hosted model runs, and easier prototyping of personalized learning agents. The project’s first release is an early step toward a customizable cognitive assistant; its roadmap invites further development of model interfaces, evaluation tools, and integrations that could become a testbed for research into explainability, human-AI collaboration, and private knowledge augmentation.