Google Gemini’s Notebooks Feature Allows You to Focus Your Chats on a Specific Topic.
On Wednesday, Google announced “Notebooks,” a new feature for Gemini designed to help organize research materials while using the company’s flagship chatbot. Google says notebooks should be thought of as “personal knowledge bases used across all Google products, starting with Gemini.”
If that sounds too vague for you, here’s a simpler explanation: Notebooks are like Gemini chats, but they’re designed to discuss a single topic, and they come with specific resources that Geminis can refer to while discussing that topic.
How Gemini Notebooks Work
If you use Gemini frequently, you’ve likely accumulated a multitude of chats on a wide variety of topics. Notebooks serve a similar purpose, but are more targeted: when you know you want to start collecting resources on a specific topic, you can select “New Notebook” in the Gemini sidebar, give it a name, and then begin adding sources. Sources can come from anywhere, including your Google Drive, your computer, websites, or text from your clipboard. You can also move previous chats into this notebook if they’re relevant to the topic at hand.
Once all the data is entered into the notebook, you can start asking Gemini questions about your topic. Gemini will then use all the resources in the notebook to provide detailed and relevant answers. Depending on your data plan, Google says you can also add more sources to your notebooks.
This tool isn’t built in isolation. Although it runs within the Gemini app, notebooks sync with NotebookLM , Google’s deep learning tool, which is perhaps its greatest advantage. This means notebooks created in Gemini automatically appear in NotebookLM, so you can not only pick up where you left off but also take advantage of all the features of NotebookLM. This means if you created a notebook in Gemini, you can open it in NotebookLM and turn your project into a video or create a podcast from your Gemini conversations .
I think this cross-platform synchronization is perhaps the best use of notebooks. Previously, you could share resources with Gemini if ​​you wanted to discuss a specific topic, but now there’s a dedicated feature that automatically moves between Google’s AI research platforms.
How to try out notebooks in Gemini
The Notebooks feature will be available to all Gemini users, even those on the free plan, but paid subscribers will have priority access: Google is rolling out the feature to AI Ultra, Pro, and Plus plans this week, and it will be available to mobile and free users in the coming weeks.