# open-notebook

> Self-hosted, open-source alternative to Google NotebookLM for AI-powered research and document analysis — supporting 16+ AI providers, diverse content ingestion (PDFs, videos, audio, web pages), AI-powered notes, multi-speaker podcasts, and full-text search.

**Use case**: Self-hosted AI research notebook across 16+ providers

**Canonical URL**: https://agentcookbooks.com/skills/open-notebook/

**Topics**: claude-code, skills, science, scientific-writing

**Trigger phrases**: "set up a research notebook", "chat with my documents", "analyze these papers", "NotebookLM alternative", "ingest research materials"

**Source**: [K-Dense AI](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills/tree/main/scientific-skills/open-notebook)

**License**: MIT

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## What it does

`open-notebook` is a Claude Code skill from K-Dense AI's [scientific-agent-skills repo](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills). It turns Claude into a setup and operation guide for a self-hosted, open-source NotebookLM alternative — allowing you to organize research materials into notebooks, ingest diverse content (PDFs, YouTube videos, audio files, web pages, Office documents), and run AI-powered analysis using any of 16+ providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Ollama, Groq, and Mistral.

A session produces a configured notebook environment where you can chat with your documents, generate AI-powered summaries, create multi-speaker podcasts from research papers, and search across all materials with full-text and vector search — with complete data privacy through self-hosting.

## When to use it

Reach for it when:

- You want to run a local, private NotebookLM-style environment over your research document collection without sending data to Google
- You're managing a large literature collection and want semantic search plus AI-generated summaries that you control
- You want to generate audio summaries or multi-speaker podcast episodes from your research papers for audio consumption

When *not* to reach for it:

- You just need a quick one-off literature search — use `paper-lookup` or `literature-review`
- You're managing references in Zotero — use `pyzotero` for programmatic library access

## Install

Copy the `SKILL.md` from K-Dense AI's [open-notebook folder](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills/tree/main/scientific-skills/open-notebook) into `.claude/skills/open-notebook/` in your project. The skill guides you through setting up the self-hosted open-notebook service and configuring your chosen AI provider credentials.

Trigger phrases: "set up a research notebook", "chat with my documents", "analyze these papers", "NotebookLM alternative".

## What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. **Environment setup.** Claude walks through installing and configuring the self-hosted notebook service, selecting an AI provider (or multiple), and setting up the vector search index.
2. **Content ingestion.** You point Claude at your research materials — a folder of PDFs, a list of URLs, YouTube links, or uploaded documents. The ingestion pipeline handles format detection, text extraction, chunking, and embedding.
3. **Active use.** With materials ingested, you can ask questions across the entire corpus, generate structured summaries, request podcast scripts from selected papers, or run custom content transformations — all against your private data.

## Receipts

**Where it works well:**
- Literature collections where you want semantic search plus AI synthesis — finding the three papers most relevant to a specific mechanism across 200 PDFs takes seconds rather than manual scanning
- Privacy-sensitive research data that can't leave your institution — self-hosting means your data doesn't transit third-party servers

**Where it backfires:**
- Initial setup takes longer than a SaaS tool — if you only need to process a handful of documents once, the setup cost doesn't pay off
- Podcast generation and audio features require additional TTS provider credentials on top of the base LLM setup

**Pattern that works:** set up the notebook once for a research project and keep it running; the value compounds as you add more papers and the corpus becomes searchable rather than staying as isolated PDFs.

## Source and attribution

Originally authored by [K-Dense Inc.](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI). The canonical SKILL.md lives in the [`open-notebook` folder](https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills/tree/main/scientific-skills/open-notebook) of their public scientific-agent-skills repository.

License: MIT. Install, adapt, and redistribute with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner's perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.