Gemini Notebook

Gemini Notebook, called NotebookLM until Google renamed it on 16 July 2026, is Google's source-grounded research assistant. Users add their own material, such as PDFs, Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, Word and PowerPoint files, web pages, YouTube videos with captions, audio files, images and pasted text, and the assistant answers questions from those sources with citations back to the passage it used. Google says grounding answers in the user's own material reduces the likelihood of errors and hallucinations. Google puts its use at more than 30 million people and more than 600,000 organizations. It suits students, researchers and teams who want answers, study aids and summaries drawn from a set of documents they control. From a notebook's sources it generates Audio Overviews (podcast-style conversations between two AI hosts), Video Overviews, Slides, Reports, mind maps, infographics, flashcards and quizzes. Source Discovery and Deep Research can find new material on the web and add it to a notebook. Since July 2026 notebooks can also be opened and created inside the Gemini app, with syncing across the two, and Google AI Ultra subscribers and some Workspace business customers can have it write and run code on a secure cloud computer for data analysis over their sources, with the capability rolling out to Pro users on the web. Consumer accounts can publish a notebook publicly for others to query. Each source can hold up to 500,000 words or 200 MB. Sources come from Google Drive, Docs, Slides and Sheets, YouTube, Google Play Books purchases and Gemini chats, as well as uploads and links. The consumer product has no public API or MCP server. Gemini Notebook Enterprise on Google Cloud has an API, in preview, for creating, listing, sharing and deleting notebooks, adding sources and generating Audio Overviews. The free plan allows 100 notebooks, 50 sources per notebook, 50 chats and 3 Audio Overviews a day. Paid limits come with Google AI plans rather than a standalone subscription: Google AI Plus, from $4.99/mo, doubles them (200 notebooks, 100 sources, 200 chats, 6 Audio Overviews); Google AI Pro at $19.99 a month allows 500 notebooks, 300 sources, 500 chats and 20 Audio Overviews; and Google AI Ultra at $99.99 or $199.99 a month allows up to 600 sources per notebook, 5,000 chats and 200 Audio Overviews a day. Plus, Pro and Ultra are only available in some regions. For organizations it is included in all Google Workspace plans, in Google Workspace for Education, and in Gemini Enterprise, which starts at $21 per seat a month. Google says organizations' data is never used to train its models, and individuals' data is not used for training unless they share feedback. Gemini Notebook Enterprise is on Google Cloud's list of HIPAA-covered products, and Google's SOC 2 and ISO 27001 scope lists name it. Gemini Notebook works only from the sources a user adds. Researchers who want answers drawn from the open web without assembling sources first can look at Perplexity AI or ChatGPT Deep Research. Teams running formal literature or systematic reviews can look at Elicit for paper search and data extraction, or Rayyan for screening. People who want Google's general assistant rather than a research notebook can look at Gemini. Current state Q4 2026: the rename from NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook rolled out from 16 July 2026, with existing notebooks and shared links redirected automatically, and code execution on a cloud computer launched the same day for Ultra subscribers. The Gemini Notebook app on Google Play shows 291,000 reviews at 4.8 stars and more than 10 million downloads, and G2 lists it, still as Google NotebookLM, with 19 reviews at 4.6 out of 5.