Get started with Gemini Notebook

What you get out of this

You have collected 140 survey responses and nobody has the energy to read them. After this guide, you can upload the entire response file, ask what customers really think and get an answer that points back to the exact lines in the material. The same thing works on the regulations for your industry, your business plan and the three articles you found about the market.

Gemini Notebook, which until July 2026 was called NotebookLM, differs from ordinary chatbots in one way that decides everything: it answers only based on the sources you have uploaded yourself, and it shows where in the source the answer comes from. So it does not make things up as easily, and when it still does, you can see it right away by clicking the reference.

What you need before you start

• A Google account. A personal account works from age 13 in Sweden, and a Workspace account works if the administrator has enabled the service. If you are under 18, stricter rules apply to what the service will answer, and some features are locked until you are 18.
• Your material in digital form. Gemini Notebook accepts PDF, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, Word, PowerPoint, CSV, images, ePub, web addresses, YouTube videos with captions and audio files such as MP3 and WAV.
• The survey responses exported to a file. If you have used Google Forms: open the Responses tab and send the responses to a spreadsheet, which you then download as CSV, that is, a text file where each response is on its own row.
• A cleaned-up version of the responses where names, email addresses and phone numbers are removed or replaced with Customer 1, Customer 2 and so on.
• Two or three questions you actually want answered, written down before you start. Without them, you get fifteen minutes of aimless chatting.

Time required and difficulty level

Setup takes 15 minutes. Going through a finished customer survey then takes about half an hour, compared with the three to four hours it takes to read 140 free-text answers by hand. The difficulty level is low. What requires thought is the wording of the questions, not handling the tool.

Create the notebook and add the sources

1. Go to notebooklm.google and log in. The address stays under the old name even though the product has been renamed, so do not get lost there.
2. Create a new notebook. Create one per project, not one per file. One notebook for the customer survey, one for the business plan and the regulations. If you mix everything in the same notebook, the answers get muddier, because the model takes into account sources that do not belong to the question.
3. Click Add in the Sources panel on the left and upload your CSV file with the survey responses. Also add the survey questions as a separate document, so that the tool knows what the columns mean.
4. Add the context. Your business plan, the product sheet and a web page about the industry go a long way. Each source can be up to 500,000 words or 200 megabytes, and you can have 50 sources in the same notebook on the free version. That is more than enough for this project.
5. Wait until each source shows that it has been read. A large PDF can take a minute. If you ask before everything is ready, the tool answers based on half the material without saying so.

How to know it worked

All sources are listed in the left panel and none of them shows an error message. If you ask a simple control question, for example How many responses are in the survey file and which columns does it have?, you get an answer that matches the file you uploaded. If it does not, it is almost always the wrong file or a file that has not finished loading.

Ask the questions that give useful answers

1. Start broad to get the map. Write in the chat box: Which themes recur in the free-text answers? Sort by how often they are mentioned and give one quote per theme. You get an overview that tells you what to dig into further.
2. Ask for the uncomfortable. AI tends to lean toward the positive if you do not steer it. Write: What are customers unhappy with? List everything negative, even things only one person mentions. That is almost always where the things worth changing are found.
3. Ask for numbers separately from interpretation. A good order is facts first, conclusion after.

   Gå igenom enkätsvaren i tre steg.
   
   1. Hur många svarade på varje fråga?
   2. Vad blev fördelningen på prisfrågan,
      angivet i antal och i procent?
   3. Vilka tre ändringar på produkten efterfrågas
      av flest svarande?
   
   Ange källa och rad för varje siffra.
   Saknas underlag: skriv att det saknas.

   The last line is what makes the answer reliable. Without it, the model fills the gaps with reasonable guesses, and a reasonable guess looks exactly like a result.
4. Click the number at the end of each statement. That opens the source and the paragraph the answer is based on. If the quote does not match the statement, the statement should not go in the report. Check at least the three most important ones before anything goes on to the customer or the report.
5. Save what holds up as a note in the notebook. Then the material is still there when you write the report, instead of disappearing into a chat history no one can find their way back to.
6. Note the limits on the free version: 50 chat questions per day, 3 audio overviews per day, 50 sources per notebook and 100 notebooks per user. Status when this was written: September 2026. Fifty questions sounds like a lot and runs out faster than you think the day before a deadline, so do the heavy review well in advance.

Turn the results into something you can show

1. Create a mind map from the Studio panel when you need to structure the report. It shows how the parts of the material connect and becomes a useful outline.
2. Generate an audio overview when the company needs to get into the material quickly. Two voices go through the sources like a podcast episode, and it works on the bus to the trade fair. Three per day are included in the free version.
3. Let the tool create a presentation or an infographic as a starting point for a presentation or a sales sheet. Treat it as a draft, not as finished graphics.
4. Write the report yourselves, with Gemini Notebook as a fact check alongside. The question Is the following claim supported by the sources? If so, by which one? takes ten seconds and saves you from standing in front of a customer defending a number nobody can show where it came from.

If you remove a source from the notebook, it disappears from all future answers, and audio overviews or reports you have already created cannot be rebuilt with exactly the same content. Download what you want to keep before you clean up. Never upload survey responses with names, email addresses, personal identity numbers or phone numbers. You do not have the right to pass on your customers' data to another company without asking them, and that rule applies even when the service is free.

If something goes wrong

• The answer says the information is not in the sources, even though it is: the file may be a scanned PDF with no searchable text. Open the original, check that the text can be selected, and if not, upload the Word version or the spreadsheet instead.
• A quote does not match the source when you click the reference: delete the claim. That is exactly the error the references are there to catch, and an incorrect quote in a report costs more than a thinner analysis.
• The answers become vague and general: the question was too broad. Replace What do customers think? with Which three objections to the price are mentioned in the free-text answers, and how many times is each one mentioned?
• The tool answers in English even though the sources are in Swedish: write "Answer in Swedish" in the question. That is usually enough, and it needs to be repeated in every new notebook.
• You have hit the daily limit on the number of questions: the limit resets, but not in time for your deadline. Split the work over two days and let two people in the company each have their own notebook with the same sources.
• A YouTube video cannot be added: videos without captions are not supported. If you cannot find captions, summarize the content in your own document and upload it as a source.

What you do next

The analysis is done, but it is based on a survey. If you want better data next time, LimeSurvey is a free tool for surveys that you control completely yourself. If the conclusions are to become sales copy, Get started with Google AI Studio takes over where this guide ends. And before you save customer data in one more tool: read Legal checklist.