teng-lin/notebooklm-py

notebooklm-py

A Comprehensive Google Gemini Notebook Skill & Unofficial Python API. Full programmatic access to NotebookLM's features—including capabilities the web UI doesn't expose—via Python, CLI, and AI agents like Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw.

Note (July 2026): Google rebranded NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. It remains the same standalone product (now also reachable inside the Gemini app), existing links redirect automatically, and this library drives the same underlying service and works unchanged. The package keeps the notebooklm-py name.

Source & Development: https://github.com/teng-lin/notebooklm-py

⚠️ Unofficial Library - Use at Your Own Risk

This library uses undocumented Google APIs that can change without notice.

• Not affiliated with Google - This is a community project
• APIs may break - Google can change internal endpoints anytime
• Rate limits apply - Heavy usage may be throttled

Best for prototypes, research, and personal projects. See Troubleshooting for debugging tips.

What You Can Build

🤖 AI Agent Tools - Integrate NotebookLM into Claude Code, Codex, and other LLM agents. Ships with a root NotebookLM skill for GitHub and npx skills add discovery, local notebooklm skill install support for Claude Code and .agents skill directories, and repo-level Codex guidance in AGENTS.md.

📚 Research Automation - Bulk-import sources (URLs, PDFs, YouTube, Google Drive), run web/Drive research queries with auto-import, and extract insights programmatically. Build repeatable research pipelines.

🎙️ Content Generation - Generate Audio Overviews (podcasts), videos, slide decks, quizzes, flashcards, infographics, data tables, mind maps, and study guides. Full control over formats, styles, and output.

📥 Downloads & Export - Download all generated artifacts locally (MP3, MP4, PDF, PNG, CSV, JSON, Markdown). Export to Google Docs/Sheets. Features the web UI doesn't offer: batch downloads, quiz/flashcard export in multiple formats, mind map JSON extraction.

Use Cases & Recipes

NotebookLM is a grounded engine: Gemini does the heavy reading and answers from your sources with citations. The winning pattern is to let it do the expensive analysis while your agent (Claude Code, Codex, …) orchestrates and handles the final mile — using NotebookLM as a zero-token synthesis + memory layer an agent drives in a loop, and pulling structured artifacts out in bulk and in richer, scriptable formats. Recipes people build on top of this library, grouped by what they use NotebookLM as:

Spend fewer tokens — let NotebookLM do the expensive thinking:

• 🪙 Zero-token research offload — Throw 30 documents into a notebook, let Gemini do the heavy analysis, and have your agent spend tokens only on the final polish. The agent just orchestrates (create → source add → ask); the reasoning happens server-side. In the wild: a four-workflow guide to stop Claude Code burning tokens on NotebookLM.
• 🧠 Knowledge distillation → a permanent skill — Run Deep Research (source add-research "your topic" --mode deep) or load a doc corpus, let NotebookLM's Gemini condense it, and bake the result into a SKILL.md your agent loads at startup — build once, reuse with zero runtime tokens or network calls, git-versioned and immune to UI drift. A packaged domain expert without hand-curating sources. (Dumping raw docs into a skill flattens the hierarchy; NotebookLM condensing first is what makes it work.)
• ✅ Self-validating skills — Have NotebookLM generate the eval set — a quiz straight from your sources — to grade an agent skill against ground truth instead of test questions you'd bias yourself. Build the skill, run it against the NotebookLM-authored evals, iterate to a pass. In the wild: a skill that scored 4/10 on the first pass and 10/10 after one iteration, graded by a NotebookLM-generated quiz.

Give your agent memory — persistent, grounded recall:

• 💾 Persistent cross-session memory — Keep a "Master Brain" notebook; a wrap-up step appends each session's decisions and fixes as notes (note create / ask --save-as-note), and a line in your CLAUDE.md queries it (ask) at the start of the next session. Storage and recall live on Google's infrastructure.
• 🧩 Grounded memory for coding agents — Expose a notebook of your internal docs/RFCs/architecture over the MCP server (or plain ask) so an agent answers from your code with citations rather than plausible-sounding guesses — a zero-infra alternative to standing up your own vector DB and embedding pipeline. In the wild: turning a notebook into the source-grounded "project brain" a coding agent consults before it writes code.
• 🪞 Query your own notes / journal — Load years of daily notes, meeting logs, or a journal and ask for cited answers across your own history — surfacing long-term patterns a keyword search can't (e.g. a weekly summary synthesized from 282 daily notes, every claim linked back to the entry it came from). In the wild: chatting with a year of daily notes as a cited knowledge base.

Turn your sources into answers & artifacts — cited responses, generated media, and exports:

• 📞 Grounded knowledge base / troubleshooting oracle (RAG) — Load product docs, FAQs, RFCs, and past tickets, then ask --json for source-grounded, cited answers for support, on-call, or internal Q&A. Or have an agent point it at an entire fast-moving tool's docs — more than the agent can hold in context — as a troubleshooting oracle it queries the moment it hits an error. In the wild: OpenClaw drove the library to scrape all 524 pages of docs.openclaw.ai, dedupe the duplicate translations, and audit it down to 269 clean sources (missing/extra/duplicate = 0).
• 🔁 Multi-format content repurposing — One source set, every format: generate audio (podcast), generate video, generate slide-deck, plus a generate report blog draft, generate quiz, and generate flashcards — fan a single notebook out across channels.
• 📤 Bulk, scriptable exports — Pull mind maps as JSON, flashcards/quizzes as JSON/Markdown/HTML, data tables as CSV, and reports as Markdown — in bulk, to local files, straight into Anki, your mind-mapping tool, or a repo (download <type> / download <type> --all). The programmatic "get data out" half of the library, not just "put sources in."
• 🕸️ Obsidian / knowledge-graph sync — Run the CLI from your vault root so downloaded artifacts (reports, mind-map JSON, transcripts) land as files in your knowledge graph; community skills built on this library even resolve NotebookLM's citation markers into Obsidian [[wikilinks]]. Pair with a podcast overview for an audio digest of your notes. In the wild: "Claude Code + NotebookLM + Obsidian = GOD MODE".

Run it unattended, at scale, or on the go — scheduled, headless, and remote:

• 🚨 Incident runbook generator — On an alert, spin up a notebook of the relevant docs, ask targeted diagnostic questions, and generate a briefing-doc report (generate report --format briefing-doc --wait, then download report) as an automated runbook.
• 📚 Curriculum / study-set builder — Scrape a syllabus or developer roadmap, create one notebook per topic (with deliberate pacing to dodge rate limits), and bulk-generate podcasts, quizzes, and flashcards for each.
• 📰 Scheduled audio briefings — Pair auth refresh --quiet (cron/launchd/systemd) with generate audio to publish a fresh personalized briefing to a podcast feed on a schedule.
• 📱 NotebookLM from your phone, agent-driven — Self-host the remote MCP connector behind a Cloudflare/Tailscale tunnel and add it as a custom connector on the web (claude.ai Connectors, or ChatGPT with Developer Mode). Then drive the full toolset — deep research, source ingestion, studio generation, cited Q&A — from the claude.ai mobile app on the go (ChatGPT's MCP connectors are web-only), chained with your other MCP tools, instead of app-hopping.

These combine ordinary library primitives — see the CLI Reference and Python API. The agent-side glue (skills, scheduling, vault layout) lives in your own setup, not this package. Per-notebook source counts depend on your Google account tier — split across notebooks if you hit a cap.

New here? Start with a walkthrough: Claude Code + NotebookLM = CHEAT CODE (video) · 5 demos + 50 use cases, with prompts.

Ways to Use

Features

Complete NotebookLM Coverage

Content Generation (All Artifact Types)

Beyond the Web UI

Programmatic, batch, and local-file capabilities the API/CLI make easy — several in richer formats, or at a scale, than clicking through the web app:

• Batch downloads - Download all artifacts of a type at once
• Quiz/Flashcard export - Get structured JSON, Markdown, or HTML files
• Mind map data extraction - Export hierarchical JSON for visualization tools
• Data table CSV export - Download structured tables as spreadsheets
• Slide deck as PPTX or PDF - Download editable PowerPoint or PDF files
• Slide revision - Modify individual slides with natural-language prompts
• Report template customization - Append extra instructions to built-in format templates
• Save chat history to notes - Persist a whole Q&A conversation (not just a single answer) as a notebook note
• Source fulltext access - Retrieve the indexed text content of any source
• Programmatic sharing - Manage permissions without the UI

Installation

The full install guide — six personas (agent, end-user, library, headless, contributor, power-user), optional extras matrix, platform notes — lives in docs/installation.md.

Quickest start (CLI users and AI agents) — install the CLI with uv tool (recommended) or pipx:

uv tool install "notebooklm-py[browser]"   # or: pipx install "notebooklm-py[browser]"
notebooklm login                           # first run auto-downloads Chromium (~170 MB), then Google sign-in
notebooklm auth check --test --json        # verify: expect "status": "ok"

Why uv tool / pipx? They install the CLI into its own isolated environment and put notebooklm on your PATH — no dependency clashes with other tools, a one-line upgrade (uv tool upgrade notebooklm-py) or uninstall, and, crucially, they work on modern macOS (Homebrew Python) and Debian/Ubuntu where a system-wide pip install is blocked with error: externally-managed-environment (PEP 668). No uv yet? curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh (or brew install uv / winget install astral-sh.uv).

Prefer plain pip? It works the same inside a virtualenv (and directly on Windows, where Python isn't externally-managed):

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate   # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install "notebooklm-py[browser]"

As a library (embedded in your app — no Playwright, no Chromium):

uv add notebooklm-py                    # or, inside a virtualenv: pip install notebooklm-py

If playwright install chromium fails on Linux with TypeError: onExit is not a function, see the Linux workaround. Contributors: see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Authentication & Access

Flexible auth for local dev, headless servers, and multi-tenant setups:

• Three ways to get cookies - Interactive Playwright login (default), import from an already-signed-in browser (login --browser-cookies chrome, no Playwright), or a durable master token.
• Master-token auth - Mints fresh web cookies on demand with no per-session browser (login --master-token --account [email protected]), so it self-heals expired sessions unattended — the auth model for servers, CI, and the remote MCP connector (claude.ai / ChatGPT).
• Multi-account profiles - Switch between Google accounts without re-authenticating.

Agent Setup

Option 1 — CLI install:

notebooklm skill install

Installs the skill into ~/.claude/skills/notebooklm and ~/.agents/skills/notebooklm.

Option 2 — npx install (via the open skills ecosystem):

npx skills add teng-lin/notebooklm-py

Fetches the canonical SKILL.md directly from GitHub.

Quick Start

16-minute session compressed to 30 seconds

CLI

# 1. Authenticate (opens browser)
notebooklm login
# Or use Microsoft Edge (for orgs that require Edge for SSO)
# notebooklm login --browser msedge
# Or reuse cookies from an already-logged-in browser session
# notebooklm login --browser-cookies chrome
# notebooklm login --browser-cookies 'chrome::Profile 1'  # one Chromium profile
# (combine with --profile to populate a specific profile;
#  use --account / --all-accounts after auth inspect when several
#  Google accounts are signed in)

# 2. Create a notebook and add sources
notebooklm create "My Research"
notebooklm use <notebook_id>
notebooklm source add "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence"
notebooklm source add "./paper.pdf"

# 3. Chat with your sources
notebooklm ask "What are the key themes?"
notebooklm ask --prompt-file ./long_question.txt  # Read question from file

# 4. Generate content (use --prompt-file for long prompts)
notebooklm generate audio "make it engaging" --wait
notebooklm generate video --style whiteboard --wait
notebooklm generate cinematic-video "documentary-style summary" --wait
notebooklm generate quiz --difficulty hard
notebooklm generate flashcards --quantity more
notebooklm generate slide-deck
notebooklm generate infographic --orientation portrait
notebooklm generate mind-map                       # interactive studio map (default); --kind note-backed for the JSON tree
notebooklm generate data-table "compare key concepts"

# 5. Download artifacts
notebooklm download audio ./podcast.m4a
notebooklm download video ./overview.mp4
notebooklm download cinematic-video ./documentary.mp4
notebooklm download quiz --format markdown ./quiz.md
notebooklm download flashcards --format json ./cards.json
notebooklm download slide-deck ./slides.pdf
notebooklm download infographic ./infographic.png
notebooklm download mind-map ./mindmap.json
notebooklm download data-table ./data.csv

Other useful CLI commands:

notebooklm auth check --test         # Diagnose auth/cookie issues
notebooklm auth refresh --quiet      # One-shot cookie keepalive (for cron / launchd / systemd)
notebooklm auth refresh --browser-cookies chrome  # Re-extract and repair account routing
notebooklm auth inspect --browser 'chrome::Profile 1'  # Preview one Chromium profile
notebooklm agent show codex          # Print bundled Codex instructions
notebooklm agent show claude         # Print bundled Claude Code skill template
notebooklm language list             # List supported output languages
notebooklm metadata --json           # Export notebook metadata and sources
notebooklm share status              # Inspect sharing state
notebooklm source add-research "AI" --import-all  # web research + import found sources
notebooklm skill status              # Check local agent skill installation
notebooklm profile list              # List all Google account profiles
notebooklm profile switch work       # Switch active account profile

Use --prompt-file PATH with ask, prompt-based generate commands, and source add-research when the text is too long for the shell command line. This reads prompt/query text from a file and is separate from source add ./file.pdf, which still uploads that file as a NotebookLM source.

Python API

import asyncio
from notebooklm import NotebookLMClient, MindMapKind


async def main():
    async with NotebookLMClient.from_storage() as client:
        # Create notebook and add sources
        nb = await client.notebooks.create("Research")
        await client.sources.add_url(nb.id, "https://example.com", wait=True)

        # Chat with your sources
        result = await client.chat.ask(nb.id, "Summarize this")
        print(result.answer)

        # Generate content (podcast, video, quiz, etc.)
        status = await client.artifacts.generate_audio(nb.id, instructions="make it fun")
        await client.artifacts.wait_for_completion(nb.id, status.task_id)
        await client.artifacts.download_audio(nb.id, "podcast.m4a")

        # Generate quiz and download as JSON
        status = await client.artifacts.generate_quiz(nb.id)
        await client.artifacts.wait_for_completion(nb.id, status.task_id)
        await client.artifacts.download_quiz(nb.id, "quiz.json", output_format="json")

        # Generate a mind map via the unified client.mind_maps API (issue #1256) —
        # two kinds: the newer MindMapKind.INTERACTIVE studio map (shown; polled to
        # completion by default) or MindMapKind.NOTE_BACKED JSON. Both export via:
        mm = await client.mind_maps.generate(nb.id, kind=MindMapKind.INTERACTIVE)
        await client.artifacts.download_mind_map(nb.id, "mindmap.json", mm.id)


asyncio.run(main())

Documentation

• CLI Reference - Complete command documentation
• Python API - Full API reference
• MCP Guide - MCP server setup, transports, and tool reference
• REST API Server - Experimental localhost FastAPI server
• Configuration - Storage and settings
• Quota & Tier Limits - Per-tier notebook/source/studio limits and how they map to AccountLimits.tier
• Release Guide - Release checklist and packaging verification
• Troubleshooting - Common issues and solutions
• API Stability - Versioning policy and stability guarantees
• Upgrading to v0.8.0 - Breaking-change migration guide for the v0.8.0 error-and-return contract

For Contributors

• Architecture - Architectural overview and design principles
• Development Guide - Architecture, testing, and releasing
• RPC Development - Protocol capture and debugging
• RPC Reference - Payload structures
• Changelog - Version history and release notes
• Security - Security policy and credential handling

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.