You can now tell NotebookLM chat exactly how to behave

We’ve made no secret of the fact that we really like NotebookLM. It’s one of Google’s best AI tools right now, and we’ve used it for everything from sorting apartment contracts to pulling together health explainers and gaming guides. It’s not perfect, but it’s genuinely useful. Google’s latest update introduces several more handy upgrades, including a new way to set goals that steer chat behavior.

In a blog post today, Google said it’s rolling out a bunch of upgrades to NotebookLM, including this new feature for chat. You can now define a goal, voice, or role for each notebook in the same way you might give ChatGPT instructions on how to respond. For example, you might tell it to act like a research advisor, a marketing strategist, or even a game master. Once set, the chatbot maintains that tone and approach throughout the entire conversation.

There are a few other big improvements, too. Chat now has a significantly larger memory and context window, powered by Gemini, enabling it to handle much larger document collections without losing the thread. Google says conversations can now run six times longer, and that user satisfaction with responses that pull from more sources has increased by 50%.

Conversations are now saved automatically as well, so you can close a project and come back later without losing anything. This aspect of the upgrade is expected to roll out over the next week. The sensitivity of your chats is considered, with Google stating that you can delete your history at any time. On top of that, in shared notebooks, your chats remain private.

Finally, Google’s tweaked how NotebookLM pulls info from your files, saying it now looks at sources “from multiple angles” before combining them into a single, more thoughtful answer. For a tool that already makes research a lot easier, these updates sound like solid quality-of-life upgrades.