At the beginning of this year, Google announced Personal Intelligence, enabling Gemini to connect to your Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube history to tailor its responses accordingly. It now appears that the company is working on expanding Personal Intelligence to one of its best AI tools, NotebookLM.
The main highlight of NotebookLM is how it grounds its responses in the sources you add. With Personal Intelligence, Google wants NotebookLM to learn from your chats to understand you and better what you want.
TestingCatalog spotted a Personal Intelligence option in NotebookLM. The toggle appeared in the Settings menu as well as on a per-notebook level. This suggests Google will give NotebookLM users the choice to turn Personal Intelligence on for everything or keep it restricted to select notebooks.
Based on strings, the report speculates that Personal Intelligence in NotebookLM will learn from your chats and create a persona. That may help the tool tailor its responses more to your liking.
The current string reads: “You are a researcher interested in AI and machine learning. You prefer concise, technical explanations with code examples when relevant.” This persona appears to be editable, which should help correct any wrong assumptions NotebookLM makes about your preferences or workflow.
For now, though, it’s still too early to understand how exactly Personal Intelligence will work in NotebookLM. If anything, the feature might allow NotebookLM to reference past chats for more context.
Personal Intelligence will further supercharge NotebookLM capabilities
Given that the AI tool is designed for ongoing research work, note-taking, and long-form thinking, Personal Intelligence should be more beneficial here. With it enabled, NotebookLM should understand how you prefer information to be presented, the tone you like, and the topics you care about—without needing repeated prompts.
While Personal Intelligence in Gemini pulls context and information from various Google services, the NotebookLM version should be more self-contained and limited to your chats.
Since Personal Intelligence in NotebookLM has just been spotted in testing, it may take a while for the feature to roll out. Google has been aggressively rolling out improvements to its AI-powered note-taking tool, so hopefully, the wait should not be long.
