I didn’t expect it, but Gemini Notebooks made me rethink ChatGPT

Gemini was late to the party where ChatGPT was already a star. Even until recently, the Gemini app, both on desktop and mobile, was pretty basic. It simply allows you to create new chats and talk about the topic, without any memory of your previous chats or a way to organize them. ChatGPT, on the other hand, felt much more advanced and well thought out, like it got its act together.

Thankfully, Google listened to our feedback – and how. Google has been ramping up the Gemini app and adding new features at such a rapid pace that it’s left ChatGPT far, far behind. The chat organization feature you were eagerly waiting to see in Gemini has arrived in such a sophisticated form that it really shows the strong control Google has over its cross-platform apps.

ChatGPT helps you organize your chats into folders called projects. I have a ton of projects for things like personal growth, my creative writing, health, home improvement, and all that. While it helps to organize chats into a single folder instead of having to scroll through hundreds of them and find the right one when you’re in a hurry, these folders aren’t as segregated as they seem.

You can give specific instructions for each of these projects so that ChatGPT knows how to respond in chats within that project. However, it does not have a project-specific memory and uses all of your chats within ChatGPT as a reference to answer your query, rather than focusing primarily on that same project to get the answers. That is precisely the problem that Gemini has solved with its own alternative.

The Gemini version is called Notebooks (I know it sounds familiar, but more on that later), and it does a couple of things better than ChatGPT, making it much more intuitive to use. For starters, like ChatGPT, you can create custom instructions for that particular notebook, and Gemini also allows you to enable an option that considers all chats in that notebook’s memory to give you a response.

But most importantly, Gemini allows you to add your custom fonts for each notebook. They can range from files you upload from your computer or extract from Google Drive, some text you can paste, or any external website. He refers to all this information when responding to you in a chat within a notebook. All of these trinkets create a project bubble that you can operate in, which is particularly crucial for segregating work stuff.

I may not have been as impressed if Google had stopped here. But I am because it wasn’t like that.

The notebooks of names inside Gemini were surely not a coincidence. Google was very intentional about this because the feature has integration for their featured product. NotebookLM. NotebookLM is a hidden but incredibly powerful feature that, in a nutshell, contains many functions with various usefulness in one. if you knew how to make the most of ithas the potential to become the best productivity tool in your setup.

I use Gemini to figure out various aspects of setting up a DIY NAS rather than a pre-built one like those from Synology. I’ve always been on the brand name NAS side, so the DIY setup was a little new and even a little intimidating for me, so I needed all the help.

One of the conversations I had with Gemini was to decide if DIY was a sensible option instead of the convenience and ease of Synology. I had another task to choose the right parts available in the local market, which also included budget planning. The most intimidating part is the setup process itself because it involves a lot of moving parts and I didn’t feel confident enough with everything on my own. I even spoke with Gemini in a separate chat about the type of apps I could run on my own home server and whether my operating system of choice would support those apps.

Those chats were scattered throughout the system, so I carefully selected them and put them together in a Gemini notebook when the feature arrived. To complete the setup, I added additional sources such as the final parts list, their respective Amazon links, and even third-party resources or counterpoints that I found online through expert websites, forums, Reddit, and YouTube videos. The laptop helped bring everything together and the best part happened when I moved everything to NotebookLM.

NotebookLM is where these scattered and isolated chats come together to form a structured, shared knowledge base with lots of personal context that I added along the way. With all that information entered into NotebookLM, it helped me summarize everything I had finalized without having to jump into individual chats and scroll through long texts to find important information. You could simply query it within NotebookLM.

When all the NAS parts arrived at my door, NotebookLM helped me create A detailed step-by-step guide with all the asterisks in place. When I got tired of reading thousands of words on the topic (because we agree, it gets exhausting), he created a podcast-style summary so I could quickly flip through it without having to lay my eyes on it. I even created a presentation with it to document everything, in case I needed to write a story about this later.

For someone like me, who tends to feel overwhelmed after seeing a lot of information, especially scattered, in one place, this flow helps to understand things more easily. Neither of these tools (Gemini and NotebookLM) could have provided this complete experience on their own. The handshake between these two Google tools is what made the entire process so smooth and complete that until now made ChatGPT feel incomplete for the type of work I do.