NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook) is genuinely good at one thing: taking a pile of sources and helping you understand them. It summarizes, it answers questions, it connects ideas. But it stops there. It won't help you actually remember any of it a month later — and for studying, remembering is the whole point.
That's what Anki is for. Spaced repetition is the difference between reading a summary once and still knowing it in three weeks. So the notes NotebookLM gives you are step 1, not the finish line. Here's how to bridge the two, by hand, for free.
The manual method:
- Grab a Q&A list or a set of key points from NotebookLM.
- Format each line as: question [TAB] answer — one card per line.
- Save it as a plain .txt file (UTF-8).
- In Anki: File → Import, and set the field separator to Tab.
Anki turns each line into a card. That's the whole trick — no add-ons required.
One step most people skip: keep the source attached. When a fact resurfaces in review weeks later and you can't remember where it came from, you stop trusting the card. Add a third field with the source title (question [TAB] answer [TAB] source) so every card stays traceable back to where you learned it.
That manual route is free and works fine for a deck or two. I just got tired of doing it every single time — reformatting, tabbing, pasting the source by hand — so I automated the whole thing in NotebookBloom, source attribution included. But if you only need it occasionally, the steps above cost nothing. 🌱
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NotebookBloom is my Chrome extension for NotebookLM (Gemini Notebook): citation export (APA/MLA/Chicago/BibTeX), cross-notebook search, and Anki export with the source attached.
Site: https://notebookbloom.com · Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fmnhogknjhlaicceielblddajjabjlha
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