Google Gemini’s ‘Notebooks’ Let You Focus Your Chats on a Specific Subject
On Wednesday, Google announced “notebooks,” a new feature for Gemini designed to help you organize your research materials while using the company’s flagship chatbot. Google says you should think of notebooks as “personal knowledge bases shared across Google products, starting with Gemini.”
If that’s a little too vague for you, here’s a simpler explanation: Notebooks are like Gemini Discussions, but designed to focus on a single topic, with tailored resources that Gemini can reference when discussing that topic.
How Gemini “notebooks” work
If you’re a frequent Gemini user, you probably have a number of threads covering a number of topics. The purpose of notebooks is similar, but more focused: When you know you want to start compiling resources on a specific topic, you can choose the “New Notebook” option on the side panel of the Gemini app, give it a name, and then start adding sources. These can come from anywhere, including your Google Drive, your computer, websites, or text on your clipboard. You can also move previous discussions to this notebook, if they are relevant to the topic at hand.
Once everything is in the notebook, you can start asking Gemini and asking the AI questions about your topic. Gemini will then exploit all the resources in the notebook to offer detailed and relevant answers. Depending on your subscription plan, Google says you may also be able to add more sources to notebooks.
Credit: Google
This tool is not created in isolation. Despite launching in the Gemini app, the laptops will be synced with NotebookLM, Google’s deep search tool, which is perhaps its biggest advantage. This means that notebooks you create in Gemini automatically appear in NotebookLM, so you can not only pick up where you left off, but 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 of it so far?
I think this cross-platform sync is probably the best use case for laptops. You could already share resources with Gemini if you wanted to discuss a specific topic, but now you have a dedicated feature for that purpose, one that automatically moves across Google’s AI search platforms.
How to try notebooks in Gemini
The laptops will be available to all Gemini users, even those on the free tier, but paid subscribers will get first access: Google is rolling out the feature to the AI Ultra, Pro, and Plus plans this week, and will make the feature available to mobile and free users in the coming weeks.
