Google Gemini launches "Notebooks," a personal knowledge base inside the chatbot

Google has announced "Notebooks" in Gemini, a tool for organizing your work with the chatbot by topic and project. It is a direct response to ChatGPT Projects, which OpenAI launched back in 2024.

The idea is simple: each notebook can hold files, past conversations with Gemini and custom instructions, everything tied to a specific topic or task. When you open a notebook and start a chat, Gemini automatically draws on the accumulated context. You no longer have to explain to the model each time what the project is, who you are and what the task is.

Google positions notebooks as "personal knowledge bases" that work not only inside Gemini itself but also sync with the company's other products. The exact list of integrations has not been disclosed yet, but given the ecosystem (Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar), the potential for linking them is huge. The company hints that this is only the beginning: "starting in Gemini."

The comparison with ChatGPT Projects is obvious. OpenAI launched Projects in December 2024, and users quickly appreciated being able to keep different projects in different "folders," each with its own history, instructions and files. Google is taking the same path, but with an important emphasis: syncing across the entire Google ecosystem, not just within a single chatbot.

Gemini already has NotebookLM, a separate tool for working with documents: you upload PDFs, audio and web pages and ask questions about that material. The new "Notebooks" partly overlap with that concept but work at the level of the whole chatbot. Judging by the announcement, Google sees this as a single system: "Think of notebooks as personal knowledge bases shared across Google products."

This is an important shift in how AI chatbots work. They were all originally stateless: every conversation started from scratch. Then "memory" appeared, first as a separate feature, then as a foundation. Now comes the next step: not just remembering, but organizing by meaningful blocks such as projects, topics and tasks.

For professional use, this matters a great deal. If you run several projects in parallel (work, personal matters, study), you don't need to mix contexts or explain everything again. Each notebook lives its own life, with its own set of files and behavior rules.

The main question is how deep the integration with Google products will go. If notebooks really start pulling data from Gmail, Drive and Calendar, Gemini will become far more than a chatbot with memory. It would be an AI assistant that understands your context across your entire digital life.

The feature began appearing for users this week.