Google is adding so-called “function notebooks” to NotebookLM to showcase its AI software and offer interactive, high-quality resources on anything from personal advice to William Shakespeare. The company tried something similar after its developer conference in May, when it created a NotebookLM laptop trained on everything that was announced at Google I/O 2025.
The new functional laptops have their own dedicated tab on the NotebookLM homepage and were created in partnership with “respected authors, researchers, publications, and nonprofit organizations around the world,” Google says. As with all NotebookLM projects, you can interact with the primary sources that make up the notebook’s knowledge base, ask questions in the chat, or view an AI-generated summary, audio overview, or flowchart to get more out of the content.
In the first round, we created notebooks with longevity tips based on the book Super Agers, a notebook with 2025 predictions based on The Economist’s annual report The World Ahead, and a notebook with tips based on The Atlantic’s How to Build a Life column, among other options. Your mileage may vary depending on how useful each of the featured notebooks is – I found the Shakespeare notebook the most fun to play with – but each is a good representation of the quality and amount of material you need to upload to NotebookLM to make it work well.
Google introduced NotebookLM in 2023 as an experiment in creating an artificial intelligence tool that relies on the sources you upload, rather than what the company has managed to scrape off the internet. The idea is that chats on topics in NotebookLM will be less prone to hallucinations than what the AI review spits out in Google Search. Or, at the very least, it would be easier to check the AI’s answers, since the source material is just a click away.
NotebookLM became really popular when Google introduced Audio Reviews in September 2024 – podcasts generated by artificial intelligence about the material uploaded to NotebookLM. Since then, the company has rapidly expanded this tool by introducing mobile apps and the ability to share public notebooks. It’s clear that Google is committed to NotebookLM, and Functional Notebooks is another attempt to demonstrate how useful the AI tool can be.
Google says that functional notebooks are available for users of the desktop version of NotebookLM today, and more functional notebooks will be added in the future.
