Important:At this time, the NotebookLM mobile app may have limitations to this feature. Learn more about the supported features in the NotebookLM mobile app .
After uploading your sources, you can:
- Ask the model questions about your source material.
- Give the model instructions to perform actions.
NotebookLM uses direct quotes, text, and images straight from your sources as citations to answer your questions and perform actions. These citations help you check the accuracy of the response. You can hover over any citation to get the full quoted text right away. If you select a citation, NotebookLM automatically navigates to the location of the quote, so you can easily view it in context.
In your notebook, you can use the checkbox on each source to include or exclude certain sources the model should use to answer your question.
Tip:Chat responses in NotebookLM only use data from your sources. If you explicitly ask the model to do something more creative, like “rewrite the end of my short story,” you may receive, “NotebookLM can’t answer this question” as a chat response. Try to rephrase or ask a different question.
Chat settings in NotebookLM
To customize your chat responses:
- In the “Chat” panel, navigate to Configure Chat
.
- Select a conversational style.
- Default:Best for general purpose research and brainstorming tasks.
- Learning Guide: Best for educational content, helping you grasp new concepts and skills efficiently.
- Custom:Best for choosing a specific style ("Respond like a PhD student”) or suggesting a role ("Pretend to be a role-playing game host.").
- Select a response length.
- Default
- Longer
- Shorter
- Select Save.
Tips:
- To pin NotebookLM chat responses to the noteboard for your reference later, select Save to note.
- When you save a response as a note, the original format—including tables and clickable inline citations—gets saved.
- Chat history is retained and kept private to you. To clear chat history, select Delete Chat History using the three dots menu within the chat panel.
- In chat, to generate a note, select Add a note. You can also access features like Audio Overviewand Mind Mapsin chat.
Additional features for Google AI Ultra subscribers
Important:These features are only available to Google AI Ultra subscribers on desktop.
As a Google AI Ultra subscriber, you can access agentic capabilities and more advanced reasoning in chat for NotebookLM to take actions on your behalf, such as searching the web, running code, or creating downloadable files, charts, and images. You can use this chat experience with or without sources.
In addition to currently supported chat functions, you can also:
- Generate new outputs, including:
- Data visualizations and charts (png, svg)
- Documents (PDFs, Microsoft Word, Markdown, and text files)
- Images (png, jpg, gif)
- Structured data (CSV and json)
- Microsoft Excel (xlsx)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (pptx)
- Make changes to uploaded charts
- Modify artifacts as versions
- Expand NotebookLM’s “thinking steps” for details on what NotebookLM is doing
- Complete research from within your chat where you can select and import your research report and sources into your notebook. Learn how to add or discover new sources for your notebook.
These new functions are experimental and in early development. Your supervision is important to help prevent unintended and potentially harmful actions. Remember NotebookLM can make mistakes and do unexpected things. Please double check it.
Change your chat request
To modify your request while NotebookLM is processing it:
- In the prompt box, select Stop
.
- Select an option.
- To revise your prompt, select Stop.
- To continue with the existing prompt, select Keep generating.
