Google launches a major update to the NotebookLM app that makes it easier to memorize and evaluate what you learn from your phone or the web. Want to transform your notes and readings into study cards or personalized quizzes? Now you can, and the chat experience also improves thanks to the Gemini models.

What's in the update

• Create flashcards to memorize key terms, important dates, and core concepts from your sources.
• Generate quizzes to measure comprehension and challenge yourself with questions at different levels.
• Customize theme, difficulty, and the number of cards or questions to match your study pace.
• Temporarily select and deselect sources while chatting or creating outputs in the Studio tab, so the response uses only the origins you care about at that moment.

Flashcards and quizzes in practice

Are you a student reviewing history or prepping for a technical certification? You can ask NotebookLM to extract concepts from your PDFs, documents, or web pages and generate question-answer cards. For quizzes, pick the difficulty and the system will produce questions ranging from factual recall to comprehension exercises.

Tip: adjusting the number of cards and the difficulty helps you create spaced-repetition sessions or quick checks before an exam.

Fine control of sources with the Studio tab

The Studio tab now lets you temporarily choose which sources to consider when generating responses. That’s useful when you’re working with many documents and want to isolate the output to a subset without reorganizing your whole library.

Temporarily selecting sources reduces noise and helps responses cite and rely only on what’s relevant, which improves traceability and reduces possible context errors.

Gemini-powered chat improvements (technical)

Google reports significant improvements in mobile chat: 50% better quality, a context window 4 times larger, and conversation memory 6 times longer. What does that mean technically?

• Larger context window means the model can process and reason over much more text at once (more tokens), so it’s less likely to cut important information from long documents.
• Extended conversation memory lets the system keep more previous interactions in the session, improving continuity and coherence in long dialogues.
• Better quality refers to improvements in responsiveness, relevance, and accuracy that usually come with larger or better-tuned models.

These advances are powered by Google’s latest Gemini models, which combine scalability and multimodal capabilities to better understand context and sources.

Who is this for and how to make the most of it?

• Students: create quick review sessions with cards and quizzes before an exam.
• Professionals and entrepreneurs: turn documentation or reports into quizzes to test your team’s understanding.
• Researchers and content creators: select only the sources you want to cite to ensure responses are based on specific evidence.

Recommended practice: start with short quizzes (5 to 10 questions) and cards focused on key concepts. Adjust difficulty based on your performance and use temporary source selection when you need highly referenced answers.

Google recommends updating the app from the App Store or Play Store to get these features.

You end up with more control over your sources and automated study tools that can speed up learning. Ready to try turning your notes into active study material?

Original source

https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/notebooklm-app-quizzes-flashcards