Though I’ve used NotebookLM for all sorts of weird experiments since the day I stumbled across it, like using it to watch a show, finally learning how to brew the perfect cup of coffee, and even turning it into a brainrot Subway Surfer tutor, the very first thing I actually did was use it for studying.

Fast forward to today, it’s still my go-to tool for studying. However, while the tool has gotten a lot of neat upgrades in the last few months, there are still a few things that bug me here and there. While you’ll now find a bunch of Chrome extensions you can use with NotebookLM to make your experience smoother and more efficient, one thing you might notice is that a huge chunk of them essentially do the same thing — make exporting sources to NotebookLM easier.

Fortunately, I found a Chrome extension that fixes one of my biggest NotebookLM pain points, especially when it comes to studying.

This extension makes exporting NotebookLM flashcards to Anki effortless

You won’t go back to doing flashcards the old way

The NotebookLM to PDF extension (which I’ve covered before and will talk about below) now has a feature that lets you export flashcards you create using NotebookLM to Anki. I’ve always been a very forgetful person, which means committing information for memorization-heavy courses to memory has always been a challenge for me.

However, it’s something I must do. After testing a bunch of study methods, flashcards are the only ones that have actually helped me. As helpful as they are when it comes to studying, making them can take hours. Literal hours! That’s time that could be better spent studying the material itself rather than organizing it!

While making flashcards is one of the few things AI has made simpler, and a lot of flashcard tools have built-in AI generators, there’s a major problem with them: they often don’t limit themselves to your sources. This means your flashcards can end up containing information beyond your own material.

This isn’t ideal for studying content, since it means you can end up memorizing details that were never actually part of your course material. That’s exactly why I ditched Quizlet for NotebookLM when it launched its Flashcard feature, which lets you generate flashcards directly from your own notes and uploaded sources. As with most NotebookLM features, it’s incredibly customizable.

You can choose whether you’d like fewer or more cards (or stick with the default), pick between easier or more difficult questions, and even give NotebookLM a direction to focus on when it generates them. While the feature is great, and I’ve been using it extensively to study (I just wrapped up midterm season), NotebookLM doesn’t really offer much flexibility when it comes to actually reviewing those flashcards. You won’t find a spaced repetition system, progress tracking, or the advanced review options you’ll get in dedicated flashcard tools.

With the NotebookLM to PDF extension, you can quickly export all your created flashcards to Anki. So you essentially get all of NotebookLM’s smarts, like its ability to generate accurate, source-based flashcards, combined with Anki’s powerful study system. The best part is how easy the extension is to use. Once you’ve installed it, all you need to do is head to a NotebookLM notebook, generate flashcards by hitting the Flashcards button, and wait for them to generate.

An Export button will appear in the top-right corner. All you need to do is simply hit it and export the file as a CSV. That’s it! All you need to do then is open Anki, hit the Import File button, and add the CSV file you just generated.

This extension goes way beyond flashcards

Flashcards aren’t all this extension is good for

This isn’t the first time I’m talking about this Chrome extension. I wrote about it a few weeks ago, when I stumbled across it while scrolling on the r/notebooklm subreddit. At that time, the extension’s core function was doing exactly what its name implied: saving NotebookLM conversations as PDFs.

This essentially solved what was once NotebookLM’s biggest issue since launch (at least until Google announced a new feature that pretty much solves the same issue) — conversation history. The extension I’m referring to here is called NotebookLM to PDF, and it lets you save your notebook’s entire conversation history as a PDF document.

Even with NotebookLM now saving your conversation history, I still see immense value in this extension, as the PDFs it produces are very well-formatted. So, I often use them as neatly organized study notes to review offline.

NotebookLM + this extension is a study setup that’s hard to beat

I’ve tried a bunch of Chrome extensions specifically for NotebookLM before, and this is among the best extensions I’ve tried. If you’re a student and rely on flashcards as much as I do, you need to try this combination out. Trust me, you won’t go back to your old ways.