I wasn’t expecting it, but Gemini Notebooks made me rethink ChatGPT

The twins arrived late to the party where ChatGPT was already the star. Even until recently, the Gemini app on both desktop and mobile devices was pretty basic. It simply allows you to create new conversations and talk about the topic – without having to remember your past conversations or have a way to organize any. ChatGPT on the other hand felt more developed and well thought out, like it had its act together.

thankfully Google heard our feedback – and how. Google went full speed with the Gemini implementation and added new features so quickly that it left ChatGPT far behind. The chat organizing feature I was looking forward to seeing in Gemini has arrived in such a sophisticated form that it really shows Google’s strong grip on cross-platform apps.

ChatGPT helps you organize your chats under folders it calls projects. I have many projects for personal development, creative writing, health, home improvement, and more. While this helps organize conversations in a single folder instead of wading through hundreds of folders and finding the right one when you’re in a hurry, these folders aren’t as separate as they seem.

You can give specific instructions for each of these projects to let ChatGPT know how to respond between conversations within that project. However, it has no project-specific memory and uses all your chats within ChatGPT as a reference to answer your query, instead of focusing primarily on that project to get answers. This is a problem Gemini solves with its alternative.

Gemini’s version is called Notebooks (I know it rings a bell, but more on that later) and it does a few things better than ChatGPT, making it more intuitive to use. For starters, like ChatGPT, you can create custom instructions for that particular notebook, and on top of that, Gemini lets you enable an option that considers all the conversations in that notebook’s memory for replying.

But more importantly, Gemini lets you add your own custom sources for each notebook. They can consist of files you download from your computer or pull from Google Drive, some text you can paste, or any external website. It refers to all of this information when responding to you in a chat within the notebook. All of these trinkets create a project-friendly bubble for you to operate within, which is especially important for separating work materials.

Maybe I wouldn’t be so impressed if Google stopped here. But because I’m not like that.

The name of notebooks in Gemini was not accidental. Google was very intentional about this as the feature has integration for its flagship product, NotebookLM. NotebookLM is a hidden but incredibly powerful feature that, to put it simply, is a bunch of features with different utilities rolled into one. if you knew how to make the best of ithas the potential to be the best productivity tool in your setup.

I use Gemini to understand many aspects of building a DIY NAS over a pre-built NAS like the one at Synology. I’ve always been on the branded NAS side, so DIY installation was a bit new and even a bit intimidating for me, so I needed all the help I could get.

One of the conversations I had with Gemini was deciding whether going DIY was a healthy choice over the convenience and ease of Synology. There was another unit for choosing the right parts available in the local market which included budget planning. The scariest part is the installation process itself, as it has a lot of moving parts and I wasn’t sure enough about everything on my own. I even discussed in a separate conversation with Gemini what applications I could run on a home server of my own and whether my chosen operating system would support those applications.

These conversations were scattered throughout the system, so when the feature came I picked them up and collected them in a Gemini notebook. To complete the build, I added additional resources such as the final parts list, their respective Amazon links, and even third-party sources or counterpoints I found online through expert websites, forums, Reddit, and YouTube videos. Notebook helped me put everything together and the best part was when I transferred everything to NotebookLM.

NotebookLM is where these scattered, isolated conversations come together to create a shared, structured knowledge base with lots of personal context that I add along the way. All of this information in NotebookLM helped me summarize everything I concluded without going into individual conversations and scrolling through long text to find any important information. I could just query it from within NotebookLM.

When every NAS part arrives at my door, NotebookLM helped me create step by step detailed guide with all star signs. When I’m tired of reading thousands of words on a topic (because let’s face it, it gets boring), it creates a podcast-style summary for me to quickly skim through without having to look at it. I even created a presentation with it to document the whole thing, anyway I need to write a story after that.

For someone like me who tends to get overwhelmed after seeing too much, especially scattered, information in one place, this flow makes things easier to understand. None of these tools—Gemini and NotebookLM—could have delivered this complete experience on their own. The handshake between these two Google tools is what makes the whole process so seamless and perfect It made ChatGPT feel incomplete for the type of work I do.