NotebookLM Flashcards: What They Do, What They Don't, and How to Export Them

NotebookLM is one of the best free ways to turn your own material into flashcards. Upload a lecture PDF, a web page or a recorded lecture on YouTube, press Flashcards, and a minute later you have a deck written from your sources, not from the internet at large. In July 2026 Google renamed it Gemini Notebook, but most students still call it NotebookLM, and the flashcards work the same way.

What NotebookLM flashcards don't do is decide when you should see each card again. That's the part of flashcard study that does most of the work for long-term memory. This guide covers what NotebookLM's flashcards do well, what their "mastery" tracking does and doesn't do, how to export a deck as a CSV, and where to take it if you want reviews scheduled for you. Gemini's own flashcards get a section near the end.

Everything below was checked against Google's help centre and Google's own announcements on 24 October 2026. Where we rely on other coverage, we say so. Google changes these tools often, so check the help page if something looks different.

The Short Version

• NotebookLM makes good flashcards, free. Cards come from your own sources, you can choose difficulty and number, and since June 2026 you can edit them and add your own.
• It does not use spaced repetition. You mark cards "Got it!" or "Missed it!", it remembers your place, and it can replay only the cards you missed. It never brings a card back on a schedule.
• You can export a deck. The flashcard viewer has a Download as CSV control.
• The CSV can go straight into Anki, Noji or Quizlet, which all accept question-and-answer text. Anki and Noji then schedule each card.
• Sticky doesn't import CSV files. On iPhone, the route into Sticky is to paste your original notes or photograph them, and let Sticky's AI rebuild the deck. The free plan allows 5 AI generations a month.

What Are NotebookLM Flashcards?

NotebookLM flashcards are question-and-answer cards that Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) generates from the sources in a notebook. They live in the Studio panel next to Audio Overviews, quizzes and mind maps, and you can review them on the web or in the iPhone and Android apps.

To make a deck:

1. Add your sources: open or create a notebook and upload what you're studying, such as PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files or copied text.
2. Open Studio: in the Studio panel, select Flashcards, or select the pencil icon first to customise the deck.
3. Customise (optional): choose easy, medium or hard, and type a prompt to focus the cards, for example "only the key terms from chapter 4".
4. Study: the deck generates in the background. Open it, flip each card, and mark it as you go. You can pick fewer, standard or more cards.

Google's help page notes that you need edit access to a notebook to generate or delete flashcards, so a notebook someone shared with you as a viewer won't let you build your own deck from it.

Is NotebookLM Now Called Gemini Notebook?

Yes. Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook on 16 July 2026, and Google describes it as the same standalone product under a new name.

Your notebooks, sources and flashcards carry over, and Google's help centre for NotebookLM now lives under the Gemini Notebook name. Notebooks also sync with the Gemini app. This guide says NotebookLM in headings because that's still what most students search for, but the buttons and help pages you'll see now say Gemini Notebook.

What NotebookLM Flashcards Do Well

The strength is grounding. Because NotebookLM writes cards from the sources you uploaded, the cards use your lecturer's terms, your textbook's definitions and your course's emphasis. A general chatbot writing from memory can drift from what your exam covers. The Explain button on each card asks NotebookLM to unpack the answer when the short version on the card isn't enough.

It is also generous for a free tool. The standard plan is free with a Google account, allows up to 100 notebooks with 50 sources each, and includes flashcards. Usage is capped by compute-based limits that refresh every five hours, up to a weekly limit, so a long session can hit a pause.

Two 2026 changes made the decks more useful:

• Editing. In June 2026 Google's official NotebookLM account announced that flashcards are "now fully customizable": you can edit questions and answers and add your own cards. Android Authority reported the change as live on web and mobile, including for free users. Before that, a bad card could only be deleted or regenerated.
• Saved progress. Gemini Notebook remembers which cards you've marked and lets you pick up where you left off.

If your aim is to turn 60 pages of reading into a set of accurate questions quickly, NotebookLM is hard to beat at the price.

Does NotebookLM Use Spaced Repetition?

No. NotebookLM tracks whether you got each card right in the current pass and lets you replay the misses, but it never schedules a card for a future date.

Here is what its "mastery" loop does, according to Google's help page:

• You mark each card Got it! (a tick) or Missed it! (a cross).
• Gemini Notebook remembers your progress if you leave and come back.
• At the end you see your results and can practise again with Same cards, All cards or Only cards you missed.
• You can shuffle the deck or restart the session.

That is a solid self-testing loop, and testing yourself is the right thing to do with flashcards (it's the core of active recall). What's missing is time. There are no review dates, no intervals that grow when you remember a card, and no reminder when a deck is due. The cards you marked "Got it!" today drop out of "Only cards you missed", and nothing brings them back next week.

Why the Missing Schedule Matters

Memory fades fast after you learn something, and it fades for the cards you got right too. Hermann Ebbinghaus first measured this forgetting curve in 1885, and later work has backed up the fix: reviews spread out over days beat the same amount of study packed into one sitting. A 2006 review by Cepeda and colleagues pooled more than 300 experiments on distributed practice and found that spaced study beat massed study across a wide range of test delays.

Take a 40-card NotebookLM deck you study on Monday. You get 30 right and drill the 10 misses until they stick. By the following Monday, many of those 30 "known" cards have faded, but NotebookLM's loop gives you no signal that they need attention. You either restart all 40, which wastes time on cards you still know, or you skip the deck and lose them.

Spaced repetition solves this by giving each card its own interval. A card you recall easily comes back in a few days, then a week or two, then a month. A card you miss comes back tomorrow. Each review lands just before you'd forget, so you spend time only on the cards that need it. Our guide to building a spaced repetition schedule shows what that looks like day to day.

You can approximate this by hand: put the deck in your calendar for one, three, seven and fourteen days after you make it, and restart All cards each time. It works, but every review covers the whole deck, and it relies on you keeping the schedule. A spaced repetition app does that bookkeeping per card.

Can You Export NotebookLM Flashcards?

Yes. The flashcard viewer has a Download as CSV control, so any deck can leave Gemini Notebook as a plain spreadsheet file.

1. Open the deck on the web at Gemini Notebook and start the flashcard viewer.
2. Download: use the download control to save the deck as a CSV file.
3. Check the file: open it in Google Sheets, Excel or Numbers and confirm questions and answers sit in two columns. Delete any header row or extra column before importing elsewhere.

Two caveats. Google's help page says downloads may be blocked for notebooks that use a Play Books ebook as a source, because of publisher restrictions. And we couldn't confirm from Google's documentation that the CSV download is available in the mobile apps, so plan to export from a computer.

A CSV holds text only. Images and formatting won't come with it, so diagram-heavy cards need checking after import.

Where Can a NotebookLM CSV Go?

Most dedicated flashcard apps accept plain question-and-answer text, but not all of them, and not all of them schedule reviews once the cards arrive.

Anki is the most direct route. Its importer takes any UTF-8 text file with fields separated by commas, semicolons or tabs, and once the cards are in, every one gets its own schedule. Anki is free on desktop, Android and AnkiWeb, and AnkiMobile costs $24.99 once on iPhone. Our Quizlet vs Anki comparison covers what it's like to live with.

Noji imports CSV files on its website: create a deck, choose Import Cards, and upload the file or paste the text. It schedules reviews, and the free tier caps you at 50 card reviews a day. See our Noji vs Anki comparison.

Quizlet imports by pasting text into a new set, with terms and definitions separated by a comma or tab. As of October 2026, Quizlet's help centre describes a spaced repetition mode in Flashcards with Repeat, Hard, Okay and Easy ratings, available on the Quizlet website only.

Sticky doesn't import CSV or Anki files. If you study on iPhone and want Sticky's scheduling, the honest route is to start from your source: paste the notes into Note to Card, or photograph the pages, and Sticky's AI writes a new deck that you can edit. You can also paste the question-and-answer text from the CSV as notes. The free plan is trial-sized: 3 decks of up to 30 cards and 5 AI generations a month, one of them from the camera. Sticky Pro ($5.99 a month or $39.99 a year) removes those limits.

How to Get NotebookLM Flashcards Into Anki

Anki is the most common destination, so here are the steps end to end:

1. Export: in Gemini Notebook on the web, open the deck and download it as a CSV.
2. Tidy: open the CSV in a spreadsheet, keep two columns (question, answer), remove any header row, and save it again as CSV in UTF-8.
3. Import: in desktop Anki, choose File, then Import, and pick the file. Set the field separator to comma, choose the Basic note type and a deck, and map column 1 to Front and column 2 to Back.
4. Check a few cards: if everything lands in one field, the separator is wrong. If accents look garbled, the file wasn't saved as UTF-8.
5. Sync: sync to AnkiWeb, and the deck appears in AnkiMobile or AnkiDroid with its first reviews due.

From then on Anki decides when each card comes back. If you later change the deck in NotebookLM and export it again, import it into a fresh deck or delete the old copy first, or you'll end up with duplicates.

What About Gemini Flashcards?

The Gemini app makes flashcards too, and it is a separate feature from Gemini Notebook. You type "Create flashcards about" a topic, optionally attach a file, and the deck opens in the Canvas panel.

Google's help centre lists it on the web, Android and iPhone, with the same core controls on each: a hint, shuffle, text to speech, and restart at the end of the deck. You can share a flashcard set by link from a personal account, though not from a work or school Google account.

In August 2026 Google added a student hub to the Gemini app at gemini.google.com/students. It gathers study notebooks, flashcards and practice quizzes in one place, and Google says it is available on mobile and web for signed-in personal accounts. In October 2026 it opened to Google Workspace for Education users of all ages. Study notebooks go further than a plain deck: you upload class materials, take a diagnostic quiz, and get short lessons with a progress dashboard, and Google says Gemini will add exam dates from your syllabus to Google Calendar.

None of that is per-card spaced repetition. Gemini's help page describes no way to mark individual cards and have them return on a schedule, and it lists no download option for flashcards. To move a Gemini deck elsewhere, ask Gemini to rewrite the cards as a two-column CSV table, then copy that text into Anki, Noji or Quizlet's importer. Our guide to ChatGPT flashcards walks through the same workaround with a sample prompt.

Eligible US college students can also get a free year of Google AI Pro (normally $19.99 a month) if they redeem it by 31 December 2026, which raises the usage limits in both Gemini and Gemini Notebook.

Which App Should You Move Your Cards To?

Keep using NotebookLM to generate cards if it works for you. It's free and it writes from your sources. The question is where the reviews happen.

• You want the cards in a scheduler today, at no cost: Anki on a computer. The CSV goes straight in, and you get the most control over scheduling.
• You want a cleaner app and a light daily load: Noji, as long as 50 reviews a day is enough.
• You already use Quizlet and study on a laptop: paste the cards into a Quizlet set and use its spaced repetition mode on the website.
• You study on iPhone and would rather start from notes than import files: Sticky. Photograph or paste your notes, get a deck that's scheduled with SM-2, and try it on the free plan before deciding on Pro.
• You'll stay in NotebookLM: put the deck in your calendar at one, three, seven and fourteen days and restart All cards each time.

For a wider look at scheduling apps, see our roundup of the best spaced repetition apps, our ranking of the best AI flashcard apps, or the best free flashcard apps for students.

The Bottom Line

NotebookLM, now Gemini Notebook, is an excellent free card writer. Its decks are grounded in your sources, editable since June 2026, and exportable as CSV. Its "mastery" tracking is a shuffle-and-mark loop, though, not a schedule. For anything you need to remember past next week, export the deck into an app that brings each card back at the right time, or rebuild it from your notes in one that does.

If you want to try a ready-made scheduled deck first, browse AP Psychology flashcards, AP Biology flashcards or Spanish vocabulary flashcards, or explore more study guides in the Learn hub.