Google turns Gemini into a workspace

Google is turning Gemini from a chat box into a place where work stays put. On April 8, Google announced “Notebooks in Gemini,” a feature that groups chats, files and project context in one space and syncs that space with NotebookLM, Google’s research tool. (blog.google) That changes what Gemini is for. A normal chatbot forgets the shape of a project unless you keep re-uploading files, but a notebook keeps the sources, the conversation and the outputs tied to the same folder-like container. (blog.google) Google had already started linking the two products before this week. On January 27, Google Workspace users got the ability to add a NotebookLM notebook as a source inside the Gemini app, which meant Gemini could answer from the documents already collected in that notebook. (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com) Now Google is moving the container itself into Gemini. The company says notebooks in Gemini can hold project chats and files, while NotebookLM remains the research engine attached to that material, so the handoff between “ask a question” and “study these sources” stops feeling like switching apps. (blog.google) A second change points in the same direction. TestingCatalog reported on April 10 that Google is preparing a broader rollout of “Skills,” which are reusable instruction sets for Gemini and Google Artificial Intelligence Studio, the company’s developer tool for building with Gemini models. (testingcatalog.com) A skill is basically a saved way of working. Instead of rewriting “summarize this sales call in our house style” or “turn this brief into a launch checklist” every time, a user can keep that behavior as a repeatable preset and run it again on new material. (testingcatalog.com) That matters because Google has been splitting Gemini into several surfaces at once. There is the consumer Gemini app, the business version inside Google Workspace, NotebookLM for source-grounded research, and Google Artificial Intelligence Studio for developers, and Skills look like a way to carry the same behavior across those layers. (testingcatalog.com) (blog.google)) Google has also been adding the plumbing that makes a workspace strategy stick. In early April, Gemini got tools to import memory and chat history from other artificial intelligence assistants, which gives Google a way to pull a user’s prior preferences and conversations into its own system instead of making them start from zero. (gadgetbridge.com) NotebookLM is already one of Google’s stronger products because it works from your own documents instead of acting like a blank page. Google said in October 2024 that NotebookLM Business would come through Google Workspace, and by 2025 the company was pitching notebooks and Gemini together for schools and teams. (blog.google 1) (blog.google 2) So this week’s news is less “Google made Gemini smarter” than “Google is deciding where the work lives.” If notebooks store the project and skills store the method, Gemini stops being a one-off assistant and starts looking more like a synced desk spread across Search, Chrome and Google Workspace. (blog.google) (testingcatalog.com)