I tried Google's hidden note-taking app that no one's talking about, and you should too

Google’s reputation for launching overlapping apps is well-earned — just look at the confusion between Hangouts, Meet, and Chat. But after years of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, the search giant might finally be onto something with its latest foray in the note-taking genre. Yes, it integrates Gemini (because what doesn’t these days?), but it’s done in a genuinely useful and tasteful way. Dubbed NotebookLM, it feels like Google’s long-overdue answer to the likes of OneNote and Notion. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find that this relatively unknown Google app has one killer feature that deserves your attention.

NotebookLM is Google’s latest attempt at a note organization app that allows you to pool information from various sources into one central “notebook”. When you first open the app, you’ll be prompted to import information from various sources such as your own documents from Google Drive, articles from any URL on the internet, YouTube videos, PDF files, and even audio clips in the MP3 format.

If you’re a college student working on a chapter of organic chemistry, for example, you could add your class notes, relevant research papers, instructional videos from YouTube, and recorded audio from past lectures. NotebookLM then pools all of this content into one place. There’s little AI involved so far, which is a good thing — I would not want an AI to do all of the research for me and potentially poison my notes with hallucinations.

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