Google NotebookLM Gets Goals, Updated Chat, and Improved Performance

Google NotebookLM is getting a significant update to its chat functionality along with the ability to set goals.

“We’re rolling out changes to NotebookLM to make it fundamentally smarter and more powerful,” Google’s Anuja Agrawal writes in the announcement post. “First, a set of back-end improvements provides a major boost to performance and quality, and second, we are expanding the ability to set goals for your notebook, allowing each notebook to adapt to your needs.”

Here’s what’s new.

Back-end improvements. NotebookLM has gained what Google calls “significantly expanded processing capabilities, conversation context and history” across all plans thanks to a full one million token context window for Gemini and a sixfold increase in multiturn conversation capacity. So you will see a significant performance boost when analyzing large document collections, improved responsiveness, and more coherent and relevant results over extended interactions.

Deeper insights. NotebookLM now automatically explores your sources from multiple angles to synthesize findings into a single, more nuanced response, Google says. “This is especially important for very large notebooks, where careful context engineering is critical in delivering a high quality and trustworthy answer, grounded on the most relevant information in your sources.”

Conversation history. NotebookLM will now save your conversation history to help you with longer-term projects. You can close and resume sessions and delete your chat history at any time, and your chats in shared notebooks are only visible to you.

Goals. NotebookLM now lets you describe the goal you wish to achieve, which customizes chat. Sample goals provided by Google include “Treat me like a PhD student,” “Act as a lead marketing strategist,” “Analyze the provided material from three distinct perspectives,” and “Act as a Game Master for a text-based simulation.”