Ep 880: Gemini Notebook: 7 New Updates and What They Unlock (Replay)

Jordan Wilson (0:02)

How long has it been since we featured NotebookLM on this show? Apparently, so long, well, it isn't even called NotebookLM. It has a new name. Yes, the tool once known as NotebookLM is no more. But don't worry, one of my favorite AI tools ever didn't go to the Google graveyard. It actually just graduated and got upgraded into the official Gemini lineup and is now called Gemini Notebooks. But the name isn't the only thing that's new. That's because over the last month or so, the team at Google has rolled out a bunch of new features that legit supercharge Gemini Notebooks and make it agentic by default. Which sounds really cool and all, but why haven't we been talking about it? Because many of those upgrades were only for users on the expensive Ultra plan. But this past week, that changed. Now the updates that have completely changed the face of Gemini Notebook are available to all paid users. And that's why we're going to be showcasing the seven most important updates today as we put AI to work on Wednesdays. All right, so on today's show, here's what you're going to learn. You're going to know why Notebook LM is no more and why Gemini Notebook might actually make more sense. You're going to know the one important grounded change that you really need to be aware of. And you're going to understand the real reason Gemini Notebook going agentic matters more than ever. All right, let's get into it. Welcome to Everyday AI. My name is Jordan Wilson and this thing is for you. It's your daily unedited, unscripted live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping business leaders like you and me keep up with the nonstop avalanche of AI updates. I tell you what matters, what doesn't, how to use it, and you take that information to grow your company and career. So it starts here, but please make sure, if you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple and make sure you go to our website at youreverydayai.com and sign up for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping the highlights from today's show in case you miss anything, as well as all of the other AI news and developments that you need to know. All right, so let's talk Gemini Notebooks. Yeah, Notebook LM is no more, so sad, right? But it's not gone. It just got a facelift both on the exterior and a lot going on under the hood as well. And this is one of those things, I think over the last couple of years, a lot of people were kind of nervous because Google has done this before, where they've come out with great products, right? And this isn't just in the AI age, in the pre-AI phase, maybe even more. They've come out with very popular products that a lot of people love, almost built like a cult following, and then they end up killing those products. So a lot of people were very nervous over the last couple of years, as Notebook LM almost seemed like this side quest that was legit amazing, right? No joke, it's, I think we named it like our AI tool of the year in 2024 and 2025 So a lot of people were worried, like, hey, don't take this away.

It's very unique because there's no, the other competitors, no one from Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, X, Grok, Meta, like no one else has something like Notebook LM that really just grounds its outputs in your data only. So luckily, they didn't get rid of it. And it seems like, if anything, Gemini Notebook is going to be along for the long run. So let's quickly go over, not going to make you wait. Here's the seven new updates to Gemini Notebook. I'm going to be going over them pretty quickly now. And we're going to be doing some live demos so you can see these seven updates in action. And then when we're done with the live demos, I'll come back and talk about these things a little bit more. So number one, new update, already talked about it. Gemini Notebook is the new name. That's number one. Number two, there's something called collections. That's a way for you to organize notebooks for easier sorting. Number three, and this one's actually really cool.

Now there's automatic Google Drive syncing. All right. Number four, bringing the Gemini and search access. So your personal notebooks can now be accessed inside of Gemini and soon inside of Google Search's AI mode, which will be really handy. Number five, new output formats. So yeah, no longer constrained to only what Notebook LM offered. Now Gemini Notebook, you can create PDFs, PNGs, documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, markdown files, charts and images. Number six, technically each Notebook has its own secure cloud computer, which is really cool. Number seven, just more agentic intelligence. And that's probably the biggest upgrade that we're going to see in Gemini Notebook now powered by Gemini 3.5, Reasoning and Google's anti-gravity agentic search. All right, so let's do it. Let's take a look live. Shall we? What could go wrong? I'm going to share my screen, live stream, audience. Do me a favor. Let me know if you can see. All right, so what I did here is I took all of my notes from yesterday's show, had a lot of them. So yesterday's show was kind of on RSI, recursive self-improvement. I have all of my notes together. This is something I routinely do inside of NotebookLM. I still use NotebookLM almost every single day. Sometimes I'll technically spend like hours inside of NotebookLM, just depends on what I'm preparing for. But to make this a little faster, I essentially just created the same version of this notebook inside of Gemini Notebook. I'm going to probably call it the wrong thing like five times. And then I have some prompts ready to go. So for our podcast audience, FYI, our AI at Work on Wednesday show, it's always a hands-on demo. Sometimes it's a little more visual, sometimes it's not. But you can always watch the video version of this on our website at youreverydayai.com. And in the podcast show notes, we always leave a link to today's episode. All right, so here we go. I'm going to go ahead and enter these prompts. We'll probably check on them a little bit as they go, talk a little bit more about these seven new features, and then we'll come back at the end and take a look. All right, so I'm just going to get these started so everyone can see, yes, these are going in real time. All right, so there's my first one that I sent. There's my second one. There's my third one.