Google adds Notebooks to Gemini and ties them directly to NotebookLM

Google has introduced a new Notebooks feature for Gemini that helps you organize research materials. Google describes notebooks as "personal knowledge bases shared across Google products," designed to pull together scattered research, conversations, and documents into a single reusable space.

The feature arrives alongside Google's full integration of NotebookLM, its AI-powered research tool, into the Gemini app. Google launched a standalone NotebookLM app last year and added it as a source within Gemini shortly after, but now you can create and manage notebooks directly inside the chatbot.

Notebooks work similarly to regular Gemini chats but are designed to help you focus on a single topic. They keep all relevant information and resources together, allowing Gemini to reference them throughout your conversation. To get started, select "New notebook" from the side panel of the Gemini app, give it a name, and begin adding sources.

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Those sources can come from anywhere, including Google Drive, your computer, websites, or text copied to your clipboard. You can also pull previous chats into a notebook if they are relevant to the topic. Once everything is in place, you can start prompting Gemini, and it will draw from all the resources in that notebook to give you detailed, relevant responses.

Thanks to the NotebookLM integration, notebooks created in Gemini are automatically imported into NotebookLM, giving you access to its unique tools, like Video Overviews and Infographics, on the same material. The reverse works too. A student could upload class notes to a notebook, generate a video summary in NotebookLM, and ask Gemini to draft an essay outline from those same notes, all without copying files back and forth.

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The feature is similar to ChatGPT's Projects, which lets users group files and conversations around a single topic. The key difference is the NotebookLM link, which gives Google users access to additional research and media tools that Projects does not offer. Google is rolling out Gemini notebooks this week for AI Ultra, Pro, and Plus subscribers on the web. Mobile support, broader regional availability, and free-tier access are all expected to roll out over the next few weeks.