Open Notebook

This is a self-hosted alternative to Google NotebookLM that gives you programmatic control over research workflows. You get a REST API for organizing documents into notebooks, ingesting PDFs and videos, generating multi-speaker podcasts (up to 4 speakers versus NotebookLM's 2), and running context-aware chats with citations. It supports 16+ AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, and Groq, so you're not locked into Google's models. The real value is data sovereignty and automation. If you need to build research pipelines, run custom transformations on source materials, or integrate AI-powered document analysis into your own systems, this gives you the building blocks. Ships as a Docker Compose setup with SurrealDB and includes both a UI and full API docs.

skills.sh installs: 2.1K
GitHub stars: 56.6K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills --skill open-notebook --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Open Notebook

Overview

Open Notebook organizes sources, notes, and AI conversations into research notebooks. It supports several AI providers through Esperanto, full-text and vector search, custom transformations, and podcast generation with speaker profiles. Application storage is self-hosted; content sent to configured cloud models is not local-only.

This skill targets the latest published release observed on 2026-09-30, v1.14.0. Request/response contracts were checked against its official source and current main commit 3127f14ea9dbb519f0e4ddc64a0742ca644ba6ef. Bundled helpers have mocked HTTP regression tests; deployment, ingestion, and paid AI calls were not run against a live instance. Deployment and remote workflow examples are illustrative.

Quick Start

Installation

Use Docker Desktop/Engine with Compose. The upstream docker-compose file configures SurrealDB v2 and the lfnovo/open_notebook:v1-latest application image. It mounts ./notebook_data at /app/data and ./surreal_data at /mydata.

SKILL.md on GitHub