NotebookLM is finally getting the much-awaited saved chat history feature. The update will start rolling out over the next week and is part of the company’s bigger design changes as the platform is preparing itself to become smarter and more capable for long-term projects.
If you have used NotebookLM in the past to analyze documents, then the addition of a chat history feature can become quite an important update. Earlier conversations would disappear once a session was closed. Now, conversations will be automatically saved, allowing users to pick up their research right where they left off. Thankfully, the company has clarified that the history is private and is only visible to the user, even in notebooks that are shared with others.
However, NotebookLM is getting a new fundamental upgrade to the AI itself. The platform is now powered by newer Gemini models, which are said to bring a big boost to performance. The tool now has access to Gemini’s full one-million-token context window, which is said to improve its ability to analyze and make sense of very large collections of source documents. Apart from that, the company also says it has increased its capacity for multiturn conversations more than sixfold, meaning the AI can maintain a more coherent and relevant dialogue over longer interactions.
If we go by Google’s official blog post, internal testing has shown a 50% improvement in user satisfaction with answers that pull from a large number of sources. The system is also getting better at uncovering connections, now automatically exploring source material from multiple angles to synthesize more nuanced responses, rather than just pulling direct answers to a user’s initial prompt.
Last but not least, Google is rolling out a new personalization feature called “goals” to all users. This allows you to instruct the chat AI to adopt a specific role or persona for the conversation. By clicking a configuration icon, you can tell NotebookLM to act as a “research advisor” who will rigorously challenge your assumptions or a “lead marketing strategist” who will focus only on actionable steps.
