Google is giving Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, a major upgrade for students, adding new features designed to help them understand difficult concepts, capture lectures, and turn study materials into interactive learning tools. The update lands alongside a free year of Google’s paid AI plan for eligible college students.
The biggest addition is real-time voice conversations with your notebooks. Google says the feature will let you talk through difficult topics using the Gemini Notebook mobile app in nearly 100 languages. You’ll also be able to ask follow-up questions, get step-by-step explanations, and interrupt the conversation whenever you need to. The feature will roll out to Google AI Ultra subscribers this week, with Pro and other tiers to follow.
Gemini Notebook is also picking up a built-in recorder in its mobile app starting next week. It’ll let you capture lectures or quickly jot down thoughts on the go, and those recordings will land right next to existing sources.
Google is expanding the interactive learning overviews housed under Reports and adding quiz formats like short answer, multiple select, and fill in the blank. These features let you quiz yourself, ask Gemini where you fell short, and tweak the questions afterward.
A new short video overview format is also included, which condenses tricky topics into roughly 60-second sharable clips in more than 80 languages. The new learning overviews and quiz formats will roll out to all users over the next few weeks.
This update builds on the Student Hub that Google added to Gemini last month. It comes with a free year of Google AI Pro for eligible US college students, which unlocks four times the usage limits compared to the free tier. Students outside the US get a free year of Google AI Plus instead, which offers double the usage limits. Both offers are available until the end of this year.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?