Gemini's notebook tools are catching up with the app that inspired them

Google has been steadily closing the gap between the Gemini app and Gemini Notebook, the standalone app previously known as NotebookLM. We’ve now spotted more work-in-progress changes under the hood of the app that should make notebooks in Gemini more useful, especially for research and study.

The Gemini app already lets you create notebooks and add material from your chats or files, with those notebooks also syncing to appear in the Gemini Notebook app. When adding a source from within Gemini, the available options right now include your camera, gallery, local files, and Google Drive. Google is now preparing to add websites to that list.

The new Website option we managed to activate lets you paste one or more links for Gemini to use as notebook sources. Multiple URLs can be separated with a space or placed on different lines, but there are some predictable limitations. For example, Gemini will only add text that is visible on the webpage, while paid content and anything behind a login won’t be supported.

That should save you from having to copy webpage text into a document or download something before adding it to a notebook. Website sources are already supported by the standalone Gemini Notebook app, so this is another case of the notebook experience inside Gemini catching up with its more established sibling.

That’s not all we found. Google is also working on a dedicated Students section in the Gemini mobile app’s sidebar. We managed to activate the section and use it to begin creating a study notebook directly inside the app. The flow asks what you’re studying and lets you choose between organizing your ideas or setting up a notebook specifically for studying and learning.

Study notebooks are designed to create personalized lessons based on a student’s course materials, current strengths, and knowledge gaps. Google says they can track progress and adjust what the student works on over time. They can currently only be created through Gemini on the web, but when announcing the feature in June, Google said that it would reach mobile apps later this summer. The interface we activated appears to be the promised mobile version taking shape.

These features aren’t publicly available yet, and Google could change or abandon them before release. But that seems unlikely,  as both additions seem like sensible steps to get the Gemini app closer to offering the fuller notebook experience already available through Gemini Notebook.