I didn’t expect it, but Gemini notebooks made me reconsider ChatGPT

Gemini arrived late to the party where Chatgpt was already a star. Even until recently, the Gemini app, both on desktop and mobile, was quite basic. It simply lets you create new chats and talk about the subject matter – without any memory of your previous chat or how to organize it. ChatGPT, on the other hand, felt much more advanced and well-thought-out, like it was well put together.

Thankfully, Google listened to our feedback – and how. Google is working hard on Gemini’s app and adding new features so fast that it has left ChatGPT far behind. The chat organization feature I was eagerly waiting to see on Gemini has arrived in such a sophisticated form that it really shows Google’s strong hold on its cross-platform apps.

ChatGPT helps you organize your chats under folders it calls projects. I have lots of projects for personal development, my creative writing, health, home improvement, and other things. Although it helps to organize chats into a single folder instead of scrolling through hundreds and finding the right one when you’re in a hurry, these folders are not as separate as they seem.

You can give instructions specific to each of these projects so that ChatGPT knows how to respond to chats within that project. However, it has no project-specific memory and uses all your chats within ChatGPT as a reference to answer your question, rather than focusing primarily on the same project to get you an answer. That’s the problem Gemini has solved with its own option.

Gemini’s version is called Notebook (I know it rings a bell, but more on that later), and it does some things better than ChatGPT, making it more intuitive to use. For starters, like ChatGPT, you can create custom instructions for that particular notebook, and on top of that, Gemini lets you enable an option that considers all chats in that notebook’s memory to give you a reply.

But more importantly, Gemini lets you add your own custom sources for each notebook. These might include files you upload from your computer or drag from Google Drive, some text you can paste, or an external website. It refers to all this information when replying to you in chat inside a notebook. All these trinkets create a project-wise bubble for you, which is especially important for separating work stuff.

If Google had stopped there I probably wouldn’t be so impressed. But I am because it didn’t happen.

The name Notebook Inside Gemini was certainly not a coincidence. Google was very intentional about this as this feature has integration for its standout product, NotebookLM. NotebookLM is a hidden but incredibly powerful feature, if I put it simply, it includes a lot of features with various utilities. If you know how to best use it, it has the potential to become the best productivity tool in your setup.

I use Gemini to explore many aspects of setting up a DIY NAS compared to a pre-built NAS like Synology. I’ve always been a stickler for branded NAS, so DIY setup was a little new to me and a little intimidating, so I needed everyone’s help.

One of my conversations with Gemini was to decide whether going DIY was a reasonable option compared to the convenience and ease of Synology. I had another one to choose the right parts available in the local market, including budget planning. The most intimidating part is the setup process itself because there are so many moving parts involved, and I didn’t feel confident enough on my own to do everything. I also discussed in a separate conversation with Gemini what kind of apps I could run on my home server, and whether my operating system of choice would support those apps.

Those chats were scattered throughout the system, so I selected them and pulled them together in Gemini Notebook when the feature came out. To complete the setup, I added additional sources such as the final parts list, their respective Amazon links, and even third-party resources or counterpoints I found online through expert websites, forums, Reddit, and YouTube videos. Notebook helped bring everything together, and the best part was when I transferred everything to NotebookLM.

NotebookLM is where these scattered, isolated chats come together to form a shared, structured knowledge base that contains a lot of the personal context I added along the way. With all the information in NotebookLM, it helped me summarize everything I finalized without having to go into individual chats and scroll through long text to find any important information. I can simply query it inside NotebookLM.

When each NAS part arrived at my door, NotebookLM helped me create a step-by-step, detailed guide with all the asterisks. When I got tired of reading thousands of words on this topic (let’s agree, it gets hard), it created a podcast-style recap for me so I could read it quickly without taking my eyes off it. I even created a presentation with it to document everything in case I needed to write a story out of it later.

For someone like me, who gets overwhelmed by seeing a lot of, especially scattered, information in one place, this flow helps understand things more easily. Neither of these devices – Gemini and NotebookLM – could provide this complete experience on their own. The hand-in-hand between these two Google tools made the entire process so seamless and complete that it made ChatGPT feel incomplete for the work I do.