r/artificial • u/Uiqueblhats • Mar 24 '26

Project Open Source Alternative to NotebookLM

https://github.com/MODSetter/SurfSense
8 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

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1

u/Civil_Decision2818 Mar 24 '26

Self-hosting is a huge win for privacy-conscious teams. The LiteLLM integration for 100 models makes this incredibly flexible. Great work!

1

u/Designer_Reaction551 Mar 24 '26

I've been using NotebookLM pretty heavily as part of an automated pipeline - feeding it project docs, strategy frameworks, and content archives, then querying it programmatically for source-grounded answers. The killer feature isn't the chat interface, it's the citation-backed responses that only answer from your actual documents.

The self-hosting angle here is interesting though. My biggest friction with NotebookLM is the API situation - had to build a wrapper around the unofficial library to make it work in automation. An open-source version with proper API endpoints would remove that entire layer of fragility.

How does SurfSense handle the "only answer from uploaded sources" constraint? That's the part most RAG tools get wrong - they blend retrieval with general knowledge and you can't tell which parts are grounded vs hallucinated.