Steven Johnson

We built @Gemini_Notebook to help you understand anything, and we designed the Expert Intelligence program to make it easy to work with trustworthy knowledge. Now you can add hundreds of free textbooks to any notebook right from the source panel. blog.google/innovation-and-a…

One driver behind @Gemini_Notebook’s growth—now #9 in overall users among all AI web apps—is the team’s investment in making Notebook the most advanced tool for managing the knowledge you need to do your best work with AI. Just in the last five months we’ve launched… Auto-Label Sources. Automatically group large source collections by topics, which you can then manually modify. (Or sort by date, kind, or name.) Effectively a version of Mind Maps that helps you keep your sources organized, and makes it easy to focus on the model on a subset of sources when you need to. Student Notebooks In Classroom. Teachers can create template notebooks for their classes, pre-populated with the semester’s assignments, and then students can create their own notebook based on that template and add their own notes, sources, quizzes, and more. Subsequent source additions from the teacher get automatically reflected in all student notebooks. In-Chat Research Agent. Part of our complete overhaul of the Notebook architecture that we launched in June, you can now trigger research queries directly from chat to explore information not contained in your sources. The research agent knows your conversation history and current state of your sources, so you can use open-ended research prompts like, “Determine what information I’m missing to complete this project and go track down that knowledge.” As always, you can choose which of the retrieved sources you want to add to your collection. Copy Notebook and Collections. Two of our most-requested features. You can now easily create template notebooks with commonly-used source collections and then copy them for a new project. Or you can organize your notebooks into collections — like folders — to manage your Notebook front door. Interactive Reports. A stunning new way to get the big-picture view of the contents of a notebook, organizing the information into a multi-section overview with recommended studio artifacts at the end of each section: infographics, slide decks, mind maps, culminating in a final quiz. We built this in partnership with Google’s Learning Frontiers team and so it’s optimized for classroom notebooks, but these reports are useful for sharing any kind of knowledge base. Audio Capture on Mobile App. You can now use the built-in microphone on your phone to record audio (and automatically transcribe) as a source in any notebook. Great for recording a lecture at school, meeting transcripts, or capturing on-the-go thoughts that you want to revisit later. Expert Intelligence. A major new cross-Google framework that allows you to bring a wide variety of paywalled content into Notebook (and soon other applications), starting with over 100K books from the Play Books store. (We’ve also added ePub support for public domain ebooks as well.) Add expert advisors to any notebook—like Eric Ries on product strategy, Annie Duke on decision-making, or Steven Pinker on writing—and get high-quality, opinionated feedback on your projects. Much more coming from this initiative in next few months. Notes as sources. Historically Notebook kept your own notes in the Studio panel with audio overviews, slides decks, etc. If you wanted the model to be aware of your notes, you had to manually convert them into sources, which then created an awkward duplicate version of the same note in both the Sources and Studio panels. Starting this week, notes are treated as editable sources which enables all sorts of amazing new knowledge work applications: “create a quiz based on my recent notes,” or “review my notes and suggest a structure for chapter three.” And those are just some of my personal favorites in the context management sphere — the full list is even longer. (We’ve got more coming in 2026 too.)