On Wednesday, Google announced “Notebooks,” a new feature for Gemini that’s designed to help you organize your research content when using the company’s flagship chatbot. Google says you should think of notebooks as “a personal knowledge base shared across Google products, starting with Gemini.”
If this is a little unclear to you, here’s a simple explanation: Notebooks are like Gemini Chat, but designed to focus on a single topic, complete with specific resources that Gemini can reference when you discuss that topic.
How Gemini’s “Notebooks” Work
If you’re a frequent Gemini user, you probably have many chats on different topics. Notebooks have the same goal, but are more focused: When you know you want to start compiling resources on a specific topic, you can select the “New Notebook” option on the Gemini app’s side panel, give it a name, then start adding sources. These can be from anywhere, including your Google Drive, your computer, websites, or text in your clipboard. You can also move previous chats to this notebook, if they are relevant to the current topic.
Once everything is in the notebook, you can start prompting Gemini and asking the AI ​​questions about your subject. Gemini will then use all of the notebook’s resources to provide detailed, relevant responses. Depending on your subscription plan, Google says you may also be able to add more sources to the notebook.
Credit: Google
This device is not built alone. Despite launching in the Gemini app, the notebooks will sync with Google’s deep research tool NotebookLM – which is perhaps its biggest benefit. This means, the notebooks you create in Gemini automatically appear in NotebookLM, so not only can you pick up where you left off, but you can also take advantage of NotebookLM’s features. This means that if you create a notebook in Gemini, you can open it in NotebookLM and turn your project into a video, or generate a “podcast” from your Gemini conversations.
What do you think so far?
I think this cross-platform syncing is probably the best use-case for notebooks. You could already share resources with Gemini if ​​you wanted to have a conversation on a specific topic, but now, you have a dedicated function for that purpose, which runs automatically across Google’s AI research platforms.
How to Try Notebook in Gemini
Notebooks will be available to all Gemini users, even on the free tier, but paid subscribers will have the first discount: Google is rolling out the feature to AI Ultra, Pro, and Plus plans this week, and will roll out the feature to mobile and free users in the coming weeks.
