NotebookLM is no doubt a powerful tool for AI-assisted research and note-taking, but it’s not the only option for building a context-aware knowledge system. If you’re looking for alternatives to Google that leverage your own documents to retrieve information, generate insights, provide summaries, and give suggestions, there are several productivity apps worth considering. And they each bring something a little different to the table.

All the tools I’m going to spotlight here use the RAG framework (Retrieval-augmented generation), which means the AI doesn’t just give generic answers. Instead, it pulls from the content you’ve already stored to give relevant context-aware responses. They’re designed for creators, researchers, and anyone who wants their notes to actively work for them.

Kortex's kAI

An all-in-one workspace

Kortex is a productivity and project management app that will feel familiar if you’ve ever used Notion. But it adds an AI layer that makes it stand out. At its core, it’s a workspace for your notes, tasks, lists, and projects, especially those pertaining to content creation, and lets you organize your ideas and workflows in one place. You can create hierarchical pages, lists, tables, and also dashboards. Pretty standard so far, and everything you’d expect from a modern PKM tool.

The real differentiator is the kAI, Kortex’s built-in AI assistant. It uses the RAG framework to pull information directly from your documents. This means any summaries, suggestions, and insights it generates are grounded in your own content. All you have to do is select your sources with the @ command, or add additional pages with the plus icon, and it will analyze the page, or multiple pages, to give you relevant and actionable output.

Another cool thing is that Kortex has a Library where you can store PDF files and web pages. You can then add these as sources when prompting the AI, which allows kAI to consider not just your notes, but all your collected materials in one place. Combine its notes and task management tools with these AI capabilities, and Kortex ends up a little more versatile than NotebookLM.

AFFiNE's AI assistant

An AI that reaches beyond your workspace

AFFiNE is another all-in-one productivity app that will feel familiar if you’ve used apps like Kortex, Notion, Appflowy, and so on. It combines notes, tasks, projects, and tables into one workspace so you can organize your ideas and workflows however you want. One of its most popular features is that it's modular, so you can easily switch between things like editing documents or drawing in the whiteboard (called Edgeless). Overall, this is one of my top open-source alternative recommendations for Notion as it covers all those same project management needs plus more.

Where AFFiNE stands out is its AI assistant, which also uses RAG to draw data from your own notes and documents. Just like Kortex’s kAI, this lets AFFiNE’s AI summaries and suggestions be grounded in the content you’ve already created, plus, you can upload sources in the form of PDFs and images. Where it differs from Kortex and NotebookLM, however, is that it can access the web in real-time, letting you bring in fresh information and references without leaving the app. So as you’re synthesizing content from your AFFiNE documents, you can do some searching and brainstorming with the AI too.

Keep in mind that I’m using the cloud version of AFFiNE which has web search enabled by default. So if you’re running a self-hosted instance, you might have to configure an API key to access web search.

The Obsidian Copilot Plugin

Bring AI directly into your vault

If you’re already deep into Obsidian, the Copilot plugin adds an AI assistant that works seamlessly with your existing notes. The AI reads and references pages you already created, giving context-aware suggestions and summaries right inside your vault. Once again, this AI uses RAG to pull from your notes to generate insights and overviews. There’s a dedicated chat panel in which you can specify the notes you want Copilot to pull from, but you can also highlight text in a document and prompt Copilot from there.

This plugin is especially useful for writers, in my opinion, who store their drafts and outlines in their vault. The AI can connect ideas across your documents that you might have overlooked, so you don’t miss anything important for your story. But it can also be a great tool for research and academic work – you can have Copilot synthesize your notes similarly to NotebookLM. Using Copilot for insights is one of my top off-label uses for Obsidian.

Unfortunately, access to web is reserved for the Copilot Plus tier. But the fact that you’re in the Obsidian ecosystem with immediate access to features like Canvas and Graph view makes it a more dynamic AI-assisted workspace than NotebookLM.

NotebookLM isn’t the only option

NotebookLM is great, but these tools prove that you don’t need to stay tied to Google to get powerful RAG-based AI. Each one lets you build your own connected workspace and project management systems, pulling insights directly from that data, and that’s a productivity boost that NotebookLM doesn’t quite have.