Google is rolling out a massive upgrade to NotebookLM. You can expect a whole new level of performance, including an 8x larger context window and 6x longer conversation memory, which were probably the most glaring issues with the app.
These changes are huge, especially for anyone dealing with mountains of documents. NotebookLM chat now uses the full 1 million token context window of Gemini across all plans. This is an 8x expansion in processing capability, meaning the AI can analyze massive document collections without losing its contextual understanding, which was an issue for a while.
I’ve had plenty of cases where my question was too long, or the response would be too long, and I got shut down. In fact, the LM didn’t even help; it just avoided the question and made me gut it more and more until it could give an answer. With more tokens, that won’t be an issue.
Google has also increased the capacity for multi-turn conversations by more than sixfold. This makes those extended research sessions much more coherent, so you can keep the conversation going across dozens of exchanges without the AI forgetting what you were talking about. I’ve gone about a handful of messages before needing to remind the AI of what has been said already, so this is really helpful.
One thing that stood out to me is that the system now explores your source materials from multiple angles. This just means it thinks about more than your initial prompt to give a more nuanced response. To me, it sounds like it checks sources more closely, which is great because you need that trustworthiness.
A glaring issue was that whenever you leave your Notebook, even if it’s to go and look at a different one, your chat history would be wiped. You can save it as notes, but that’s not worth filling up your source limits. Luckily, now, your conversation history will be automatically saved to support long-term projects.
So you can close a session and pick it up later without losing your chat logs. You can delete your history anytime with that refresh button on top, but keep in mind your chat is only visible to you in shared notebooks. This part will roll out throughout the week.
A real game-changer for many users will be the new ability to personalize your chat with goals, roles, and voices. This makes NotebookLM less of a generic research partner and more of whatever you need. This could be anything from a rigorous professor to a storyteller helping you find new ideas. You just click the configuration icon and write how you want your chat to behave.
I absolutely love NotebookLM and even pay for the subscription to do more with it. My biggest concern was that the app didn’t get much token space from Google, which made it less informative and helpful than it could have been. While there are plenty of awesome features, it’s clear that it had limitations when it couldn’t answer questions or forgot what was in the sources.
With these upgrades, it should be a lot more helpful, and I’m excited to see what I can do with it.
Source: NotebookLM