A LOCAL NOTEBOOKLM ALTERNATIVE
A NotebookLM alternative for documents you cannot upload
NotebookLM is a genuinely good tool. If you are happy uploading your documents to Google, use it — it is free, its citations are excellent, and its free tier (50 sources per notebook) is larger than ours. This page is for the other case: the documents you are not allowed, or not willing, to put on someone else's server. That is the whole reason GI JI exists.
If your work makes uploading impossible
Lawyers with client files, therapists with session notes, accountants with client accounts, researchers under an ethics approval — for all of them, uploading is not a step they can take. GI JI runs on the machine. Nothing leaves unless you switch on the optional Connected AI, and even then it shows you the exact packet and waits for you to approve that one request.
The honest limit, said here so you do not discover it later
GI JI refuses more often than NotebookLM does. In its strictest mode, if it cannot attach enough evidence from your own documents, it stops rather than composing something plausible. That is deliberate: it under-answers rather than inventing. If you want a confident paragraph every time, NotebookLM gives you one. If you want the truth about what your own documents support, that is what this is.
SEE IT IN 60 SECONDS
Answer, cited passage, and an honest refusal.
Ask a question of your own documents, open the exact cited passage, then ask something your library does not contain and watch it stop instead of inventing.
HOW GI JI COMPARES
Where GI JI wins, and where it does not.
Three comparisons with the tools you are most likely choosing between, each one naming the case where the other tool is the better buy.