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 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 in Gemini."

If that's a bit too vague for you, here's a simpler explanation: Notebooks are like Gemini chats, but designed to focus on a single topic, complete with bespoke resources Gemini can reference as you discuss that topic.

How Gemini's "notebooks" work

If you're a frequent Gemini user, you probably have a number of chats spanning any number of topics. The goal of notebooks is similar, but more focused: When you know you want to start compiling resources on a specific subject, you can choose the "New notebook" option on the side panel of the Gemini app, give it a name, then start adding sources. These can be 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 everything is in the notebook, you can start prompting Gemini and asking the AI questions about your topic. Gemini will then pull from all the resources in the notebook to offer detailed, relevant responses. Depending on your subscription plan, Google says you may be able to add more sources to notebooks, too.

Credit: Google

This tool isn't made in isolation. Despite launching in the Gemini app, notebooks will sync with NotebookLM, Google's deep research tool—which is perhaps its biggest perk. That means, notebooks you create in Gemini automatically appear in NotebookLM, so you can not only pick up where you left off, you can take advantage of NotebookLM's features. That means 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.

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 chat about a specific topic, but now, you have a dedicated function for that purpose, one that automatically moves across Google's AI research platforms.

How to try notebooks in Gemini

Notebooks will be available to all Gemini users, even those on the free tier, but paid subscribers will have first dibs: Google is rolling out the feature to AI Ultra, Pro, and Plus plans this week, and will make the feature available to mobile and free users in the coming weeks.

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