It was a pretty good stack. It worked, but it also meant three long logins, three places to pay every month, and three contexts because none of these could realistically share data.
Then I started using NotebookLM more seriously, and one by one, I dropped each of these tools. NotebookLM does all of it better.
Great at transcription, not much else
I was paying for features I didn’t actually use
The first one to go out the door was Otter.ai. This tool does just one thing, but it does it extremely well: it joins a call, be it on Zoom or Google Meet, and writes down exactly what happened.
It’s a great tool for live, real-time transcription, and it excels at segregating different speakers as well.
Most of what I use this for is live transcription. My recordings tend to be conversations, interviews, and personal voice memos that I want to act on later, and not really follow along in the moment.
So I was basically paying for a tool that was overkill for my needs. The problem with using Otter.ai was that, as good as its transcription is, everything else falls apart.
Summarization, which one would assume would be a key tent pole feature, does a basic job. Similarly, if you want to question a transcript or pull a thread across multiple conversations, other AI tools tend to be a lot better. Specifically, NotebookLM turns out to be a lot better.
So, I’ve cut out the middle step. I now record audio using the voice recorder on my phone, export this audio file, and upload it directly to a notebook. Gemini in NotebookLM handles the transcription beautifully, doing basically exactly what Otter.ai did.
But more than that, I can act on this transcript better. For example, I can ask it questions, or ask it to tabulate key meeting points. Since NotebookLM uses your data as the ground truth, you know you’ll get accurate answers.
Now I have a dedicated notebook per project with all the transcripts, supporting documents, and any relevant background material in one place.
I can act on it with a true AI assistant instead of just a transcription engine that cost me $10 a month.
NotebookLM replaced Readwise and half my Notion workflow
Query-based retrieval changes everything
Notion tends to be a darling in the productivity world, but I’ve found it to be little more than a glorified spreadsheet or database.
It’s a great place to put things, but on its own, it’s not a very good place to find things again.
I’ve tried everything from databases to linked pages and tagging systems that I’ve refined over time. Still, the experience of trying something that I’d read six months ago is less than optimal.
For the longest time, I paired Notion with Readwise. This app resurfaces highlights on a schedule and nudges you back towards the thing that you’d bookmarked or flagged.
It can sync across devices, and it works very well, too. But it can’t help you act on that information.
Like Otter, these two tools were replaced by NotebookLM for me.
Here’s how it differs. Instead of building a knowledge storage system and then trying to shoehorn ways to remember that information, Notebook LM forces you to upload the sources that you’re working with. These could be articles, PDFs, research, or even your personal notes and voice notes.
It then allows you to have a conversation with all of this information. Since this process is entirely query-based, you can ask it questions and follow-up questions, and you’ll get granular responses, unlike something like Readwise, which would show you exactly what you had bookmarked.
This has allowed me to switch from Notion’s paid tier to the free tier.
I still use it for projects that require structure, which could include everything from tracking project status to client info. All of that management and day-to-day use actually happens in Notebook LM.
It helps that NotebookLM has a long enough context window to easily support hundreds of documents in a single notebook while still pulling all that information together.
None of this would have been possible with Notion or Readwise.
If information retrieval is your problem, NotebookLM is the solution
NotebookLM doesn’t perfectly replace everything. For example, it’s not really a note-taking app in the traditional sense.
So if you are hoping for tagging or Obsidian-style graph views, or a generic structured view to link ideas, that’s not what you’ll get here. You likely want to pair it with another system, like I have with Notion.
If your problem tends to be information retrieval rather than information management, NotebookLM is the easiest way to replace two or three tools in your arsenal and end up with better results.
