Gemini Notebook, formerly known as NotebookLM, is getting a new feature that will let you directly access and cite information from the books you own. Fittingly, Google refers to this new feature as Expert Intelligence, and the whole idea behind it is pretty clear. Instead of citing information from the sources you upload, or pull from the internet, you can now also extract knowledge from digital books you’ve purchased.
Of course, you must own the book after purchasing it from the Google Play Books library. For now, Google is offering one free book to users in the US as part of the launch campaign, with a caveat — “while supplies last.” At the moment, Expert Intelligence is only available in the Gemini Notebook app and its web dashboard, but down the road, Google says that it will also appear within the core Gemini app and AI mode in Search.
The broad idea behind expert intelligence is to combine what you can already do with Gemini, and expertise sourced from your favorite books. So, if you’re asking Gemini to create a meal plan that is based entirely on chicken and spinach, you can ask the AI assistant to look for relevant recipes in one of Martha Stewart’s cookbooks that you own. You can use these books as a source and turn them into Infographics, Audio Overviews, and Quizzes, among other formats.
Expert Intelligence is available starting today, and it’s open for books published by big names like Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan Publishers, O’Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House, covering over 100,000 titles.
Google has also partnered with a handful of authors to create Featured Notebooks, which offer additional insights apart from their books. The feature is pretty neat, but it’s not an open buffet. For example, if you create a shared Gemini notebook, the other people who have access to it will also have to own or purchase a copy of that book to fully use Expert Intelligence.