Google unveiled a major addition to its Gemini AI chatbot on Wednesday: notebooks, a workspace that bundles files, prior conversations and custom prompts around a single topic. By pulling everything into one view, Gemini can draw on that context during a chat, making interactions more efficient and personalized.

The concept echoes the Projects feature that OpenAI rolled out for ChatGPT in 2024. While both tools let users store related content together, Google frames notebooks as "personal knowledge bases" that extend across its ecosystem, starting with Gemini. The company highlighted tight integration with NotebookLM, its AI‑powered research assistant, so that sources added in one app appear automatically in the other.

Rollout begins this week for Gemini’s paid tiers—Ultra, Pro and Plus—available on the web. Google said mobile users and those on the free tier will receive the feature in the "coming weeks," though no exact dates were provided. Early adopters can already create notebooks, import documents from Drive, attach chat histories and set custom instructions that Gemini will reference in real time.

"Think of notebooks as a shared, searchable repository that travels with you across Google services," a Google spokesperson told reporters. The integration promises to cut down on repetitive prompting, letting users pick up conversations where they left off, whether they’re drafting a report, researching a topic or brainstorming ideas.

Industry observers note that the move positions Google to compete more directly with OpenAI’s product suite, which has leveraged Projects to lock users into a cohesive workflow. By tying notebooks to existing Google tools like Drive and NotebookLM, the company hopes to keep users within its cloud environment while delivering a richer AI experience.

Google has not disclosed pricing changes tied to the new feature, but the rollout aligns with its broader strategy to monetize Gemini through tiered subscriptions. Existing Ultra, Pro and Plus subscribers will receive notebooks at no extra cost, while the free tier will gain access later, potentially encouraging upgrades.

Experts caution that the success of notebooks will hinge on how intuitively users can organize and retrieve information. Early feedback from beta testers praised the seamless sync with NotebookLM but raised concerns about potential information overload if notebooks become cluttered.

As AI chatbots become central to daily workflows, tools that help manage context are likely to gain traction. Gemini’s notebooks represent Google’s latest effort to turn its conversational AI into a more structured, knowledge‑driven assistant.

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