A one-minute orientation before the details below: the new name, what Gemini Notebook builds from your own sources, which features your under-18 students cannot use, and the one privacy rule that does not change.
Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) isn’t exactly an assistant like Custom GPTs, Gems, or Claude Projects, but it’s incredibly powerful for understanding and working with a lot of content. In this lesson, you’ll see how Gemini Notebook acts like an intelligent research partner, making dense materials easier to absorb. Plus, you’ll learn how we used it to create many of the audio and video assets in this course.
Gemini Notebook is Google’s AI-powered research and note-taking tool that becomes an expert on your documents. You upload your sources, from PDFs, Google Docs, and Slides to web links, YouTube videos with transcripts, audio files, and even full EPUB e-books, and Gemini Notebook grounds every answer in that material, with clear citations back to the original source. Because it works only from what you give it, it is far less likely to “make things up” than a general chatbot.
What started as an audio-summary tool has grown into a full study-and-research workspace. Beyond answering questions, Gemini Notebook can now turn your sources into podcasts, videos, mind maps, reports, slide decks, infographics, and ready-to-use study sets. Everything below is generated from your own materials.
New name, same tool (July 2026). Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. Your existing notebooks, your links, and anything you have shared all keep working, and the old web address forwards to the new one. If a screenshot or video in this lesson still shows the old name and logo, the workflow it demonstrates has not changed.
The rename came with a real upgrade, though not for everyone yet. On paid plans, a notebook can now run its own code against your sources, so it can do the analysis for you and build charts and tables from the numbers inside your documents instead of only describing them. On the free Standard plan you still get the chat, the citations, and every Studio output listed below.
The Studio panel is where you turn your uploaded sources into finished outputs. You can keep several outputs in the same notebook, for example an English and a Spanish version side by side, and work with more than one at a time.
If your students will use it, check the age rules first. Google restricts several of these features for users under 18. In a Workspace for Education account, students under 18 can use Gemini Notebook, Audio Overviews, Video Overviews, Flashcards, Quizzes, Reports, and the chat.
They cannot use Interactive mode in Audio Overviews, Cinematic or Short Video Overviews, Deep Research, Infographics, or Slides. Plan around that before you build a student-facing activity. Google also notes that your organization’s data region settings do not apply to data processed and cached by Gemini Notebook, which is worth raising with your district before you upload anything sensitive.
Alongside the Studio, the chat answers your questions with citations, saves your conversation so you can pick it up later, and can turn any discussion straight into an Audio Overview, Video Overview, or report. Google also states that files you upload to your personal notebooks are not used to train its AI models.
We actually used Gemini Notebook to create some of this course’s videos, uploading our lesson scripts and guiding the tool to generate narrated video overviews. It saved us hours of manual editing and helped the visuals match the teaching flow. Here is a quick look at Gemini Notebook in action.
Because Gemini Notebook works only from the sources you give it, it is a natural fit for education. Here are practical ways teachers and families can use it.
For teachers
A note on privacy: keep identifiable student information out of any AI tool unless your district has approved it. Upload your own curriculum, standards, and instructional materials rather than student records. See the Using AI Responsibly lesson in this course for the details.
For parents and families
For administrators and teams: Gemini Notebook can turn policy manuals or meeting notes into narrated staff-training videos, pull the key findings from several reports at once, or compare documents, all grounded in the actual files.
Gemini Notebook is not a chat assistant, it is a research and study partner that turns your materials into something you can read, listen to, watch, map, and study from, always tied back to the original source. It helps you and your students understand complex information faster without losing the connection to where it came from. In this course we leaned on Gemini Notebook to create several of the videos, and it can do the same for you in planning, training, and study. Think of it as your AI-powered “notebook that talks, shows, maps, and quizzes,” a way to immerse yourself in your own materials with creativity and clarity.
Try it now. Create a notebook, add one source (a PDF, an article, or your slides), then generate an Audio Overview and a set of flashcards from it. Notice how both stay grounded in your own document.
¿Cómo colocarlo?
Si no sabes cómo colocar el acento escrito, te compartimos varios enlaces que te pueden ayudar según sea el caso de tu dispositivo.
Windows – Keyboard shortcuts for international characters
Windows – How to Type Characters with Accents on Windows
Mac OS and iOS – Enter characters with accent marks on Mac
Android – Type in a different language
