Gemini Notebook
5 minute read
Gemini Notebook is Google’s AI research and learning tool. You give it your documents, PDFs, websites, or videos as sources. It then answers questions, creates summaries, and generates resources, drawing only on those sources and citing them throughout.
Go to Gemini Notebook and sign in with your school Google account to get started. Pupils in Years 10 to 13 can use it too, with a few restrictions.
Gemini Notebook was called NotebookLM until July 2026. It’s the same tool, and your existing notebooks, sources, and shared links all still work. You may still see the old name in places while the change rolls out.
Main areas of Gemini Notebook
Sources
Sources are the foundation of your notebook. Add documents, websites, images, and videos to serve as the notebook’s knowledge base. You can also add an ebook you’ve bought on Google Play Books, if it’s eligible: open it in Google Play Books and select the Tools badge to check. In the mobile app, you can record audio, such as a talk or a meeting, and add the recording as a source.
Gemini Notebook takes a snapshot of each source when you add it. For Google Drive documents, you can re-sync to pick up changes: select the source, then Sync with Google Drive.
Chat
Chat with your notebook to ask questions and get answers based on your sources.
The approach is the same as prompting Gemini—but every response is grounded in your notebook’s sources, complete with citations.
You can save chat responses as a note.
In the mobile app, you can also talk to your notebook out loud and interrupt to ask a follow-up.
Use the settings button to customise how the chat responds. Choose a goal such as Learning guide, or define a custom style or role for the notebook.
Studio
Studio lets you generate resources from your sources using AI.
- Audio overview: a podcast-style conversation between two AI hosts discussing the main ideas from your sources.
- Data table: extracts data or important information from your sources.
- Flashcards: a set of question-and-answer cards about the material, which you can add to or edit.
- Infographic: a visual summary of the main facts and figures from your material.
- Mind map: an interactive diagram showing how the main topics and ideas in your sources connect.
- Quiz: a quiz with short-answer, multiple-choice, and fill-in-the-blank questions, which you can add to or edit. Afterwards, you can chat with the notebook about how you did.
- Report: a structured piece of writing drawing from your sources. Choose Interactive learning overview for a summary combined with quizzes, flashcards, and mind maps.
- Slide deck: a ready-made presentation covering the main points from your notebook.
- Video overview: a video in one of three formats: cinematic, explainer, or short, which runs for about a minute. For an explainer, you can also choose a visual style.
The cinematic format isn’t available on every account.
Some tiles include an arrow button to the right. Select it to customise the resource or provide specific instructions.
You can also use Add note to add your own annotations to your notebook’s resources.
Notebooks in the Gemini app
Your notebooks are also built into the Gemini app. They’re listed in its left-hand panel, and you can create a new notebook from either app. It’s the same notebook in both, and changes such as new sources or custom instructions appear in each.
The two apps answer differently:
- Gemini Notebook: responses draw only from your sources, reducing the risk of AI hallucinations, where the AI generates plausible but incorrect information. The Studio tools and Google Play Books sources are only here.
- Gemini app: responses draw on your sources but can also use web search and Gemini’s other tools.
Notebooks you’ve shared don’t appear in the Gemini app. A notebook you’ve chatted with in the Gemini app stays private and can’t be shared.
Pupil access
Gemini Notebook is currently available to Outwood pupils in Years 10 to 13.
Pupils have access to most of the same features as staff. However, they cannot:
- Generate new slides or infographics, though they can view any in a notebook you share with them
- Use Deep Research, which searches the web for new sources and writes a report on them
- Join an audio overview in interactive mode, where you can ask the AI hosts questions
- Talk to a notebook out loud in the mobile app
- Add Google Play Books as sources, because they don’t have Google Play
- Open their notebooks in the Gemini app, which pupils don’t have
Share notebooks with groups of pupils as classwork in Google Classroom. Once pupils have used it, Classroom shows a summary of how they engaged with the notebook, and you can read each pupil’s chat.
Example notebooks
These public notebooks showcase Gemini Notebook’s features. They are read-only, so you cannot generate your own resources. You can still explore the existing ones and chat with the notebook, as a colleague or pupil would if you shared it with them.