AI Notebook
A local NotebookLM alternative for macOS and Windows. Chat with documents offline through Ollama, get cited answers, and keep your research on your machine.
AI Notebook is an open-source NotebookLM alternative for people who want to research their own documents on their desktop. It runs natively on macOS 14+ and Windows 10/11, with Ollama for offline AI. You don't need an account. The project uses the MIT license.
You can ask questions across PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, Excel files, web pages, Markdown, and plain text. Answers include clickable citations that show the supporting passage. You can also limit a conversation to selected sources. Search matches both meaning and exact keywords, useful when research includes specific names or terminology.
Notebooks keep separate projects organized. The note editor supports attachments, autosave, and version history, and you can save an AI answer directly as a note. Notes become searchable alongside your sources. Reusable prompts produce summaries, key points, or extracted entities, with custom prompts and batch processing for repeated work.
With Ollama, documents, embeddings, notes, and conversations stay on your computer. Optional connections include Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenAI-compatible endpoints such as LM Studio, and an OpenWebUI server on your network. Choosing a cloud provider sends AI requests to that service; API keys stay in the operating system's credential vault. Fetching web sources requires a connection.
The Windows app also includes optional web search, source tags, saved source sets, Markdown note exports, notebook archives, and database backup and restore.
