On 23 October 2026, Google made Gemini Notebook a Connected App inside the Gemini app. In practice, that means you can type @Gemini Notebook in the middle of a normal Gemini conversation and ask it to create a notebook, add sources or answer a question from documents you saved earlier. Until now the two lived in separate apps, so moving a useful chat into a notebook meant copying and pasting.
Quick context on the name
Gemini Notebook is the product you may still know as NotebookLM. Google renamed it on 16 July 2026 and says it is the same standalone product, now working across more of Google's apps. Its job hasn't changed. You give it your own sources, such as PDFs, Google Docs, websites or videos, and it answers questions using only those sources. Google says more than 30 million people and over 600,000 organisations use it.
What you can do from a Gemini chat
Google lists four kinds of actions. You can create, edit or delete a notebook. You can add, update or delete the sources inside one. You can ask for a list of your notebooks and what is in each, and you can ask questions that Gemini answers using the context in your notebooks. Gemini can also decide on its own to use the notebook connection when a prompt clearly needs it, so the @ mention is a shortcut rather than a requirement.
These are the example prompts Google gives, and they are a good place to start:
- "Create a Gemini Notebook about solar farm market trends"
- "Add a copy of this chat to my notebook about Bio 101 course"
- "Show me a list of all the sources in my notebook about US National Parks"
- "What do my Gemini Notebooks say about butterfly migration?"
Notebook answers and chat answers are different
This is the detail worth remembering. Google's help page says answers inside Gemini Notebook are grounded only in your notebook sources. When you ask the same question through Gemini chat, the answer uses your notebook sources but may also pull in web search and other tools. If you need an answer you can trace back to your own documents, for a client report or a compliance question for example, open the notebook itself and ask there.
A few other limits apply. The Studio features, such as Audio Overviews, Video Overviews, infographics and slide decks, are only available in Gemini Notebook itself. Chats you add to a notebook become read-only there. Notebooks that have been shared with others don't show up in Gemini, even ones you own, and a notebook that contains Gemini chats can't be shared.
Who gets it, and how to turn it on
Google says the feature is available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers and people with personal Google accounts, in supported regions. For Workspace, it is on by default for anyone whose admin has both Gemini and Gemini Notebook switched on. For personal accounts it is on by default too, except in the European Economic Area, where it starts switched off. If you are in the EU, open the Gemini app, go to Settings, then Connected Apps, and turn Gemini Notebook on.
A habit worth starting this week
The useful change here is that saving research now happens in the place you already work. Pick one project you are researching, create a notebook for it, and after every Gemini conversation that taught you something, type "@Gemini Notebook add a copy of this chat to my notebook about [project]". After a couple of weeks you have a private library you can question, and every answer points back to something you actually read.
If you want to see where Gemini fits next to other research tools, the Gemini page in Learn shows what it does best today, and Stacks shows which tools people combine for research work.