Google’s AI note-taking app now allows you to interact with books

Google’s AI note-taking app, Gemini Notebook, can now pull information from the books you’ve purchased. The new “Expert Intelligence” feature allows you to bring titles from Google Play Books directly into Gemini Notebook, which means you can ask questions about the material, as well as generate plans, infographics, AI podcasts, and more based on their contents.

During a briefing with The Verge, Google Labs editorial director Steven Johnson showed how you can use the tool to generate a recipe book using the information in Michael Pollan’s Food Rules. In another example, Gemini Notebook applied the knowledge from Kim Scott’s management-focused Radical Candor to answer a question about handling a difficult conversation with an employee. You’ll also be able to view the full text of the book directly in Notebook.

To start, more than 100,000 books from publishers like Penguin Random House, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan Publishers, O’Reilly Media, and others will support Expert Intelligence. Google also worked with 15 authors, including Pollan, Scott, Steven Pinker, and Jennifer Wallace, to create “Featured Notebooks” that each author customizes with additional source material, intro letters, and more. Titles that support the feature will have “Gemini Notebook” listed under the “Tools” badge in Google Play Books.

“I’m really interested in the idea of building a collection of people whose work you really value, and kind of creating your own dream team of advisors that are just available to you wherever you go,” Johnson says.

Additionally, Google built protections into Gemini Notebook to prevent other users from accessing material from books they haven’t purchased. If you share a Notebook that includes a purchased book, a user who doesn’t own the title will see it listed as a source, but they won’t be able to view the full text or information related to it. Clicking the source will direct users to Google Play Books, where they can purchase it.

“We want to be able to create a space where users can bring whatever knowledge, whatever expertise they think is going to be most relevant and do it in a way that creates new revenue possibilities for authors and publishers as well,” Johnson says.

Google will eventually bring this feature to AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, both of which can already pull information from Gemini Notebook. The company also has plans to expand Expert Intelligence to support scholarly articles, magazine articles, and newspapers, according to Johnson.