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Ask HN: Is there an API that enables something similar to notebooklm?

3 points by etewiah ↗ HN
I've been blown away by notebooklm and would love to use it via an API. There currently isn't an official API but is there some alternative way of enabling something similar via an API or combination of APIs?

10 comments

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solardev
You could script it with a headless browser and Playwright, probably, or just inspect the NotebookLM app and make similar API calls to the ones it's sending.
etewiah
Thanks - yes, scripting is the way I'll go if I don't find another solution.
solardev
I was just playing with something similar today... seems like Cloudflare Workers supports Puppeteer now, so you can easily use that to make a serverless API that runs a headless browser: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/platform...
etewiah
Nice. I have scripted playwright in the past so I'll start with that and try the cloudflare option if I stumble on that.
etewiah
Sorry, unrelated question. Do you happen to use some tool to find out when someone replies to you?
solardev
Heh, I actually just go the "threads" link a few (uh... hundred?) times a day (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=etewiah) and scroll through them manually. I don't always catch the replies, especially if they fall to the 2nd page or beyond.

A sibling comment mentioned one service. https://www.hnreplies.com/ is another one that I've used in the past, but it got too noisy (not spam, just frequent emails). I'd prefer an app with push notifications and proper threading.

Like many others, I once tried building an alternative HN frontend with replies caching and push notifications, but the HN API is so barebones/lackluster and poorly documented that I gave up after a few days (basically, for anything that requires a login, you end up having to just scrape the HTML). Every once in a while, there's some talk of improving the API to make it more robust, but I don't think it's a priority for YCombinator.

So old-school scrolling it is :)

curiousbear
you can try outscale.ai (disclaimer: i'm the founder). if you like, we can work on providing you an api