If you’re an avid NotebookLM user, you probably already know how satisfying it is to feed it sources and watch it generate readable, well-structured insights and summaries of your work. It truly is like having your own personalized research assistant. Until you realize its biggest limitation - it lives in its own little bubble. NotebookLM did introduce web search this year, but it’s rather limited - I’m honestly better off just using Google search. So I wanted to try something new for my studies.

ChatGPT released a feature called Study Mode earlier this year. I thought it was just going to be another paywalled or gimmicky feature that won’t benefit me much, but it’s actually available to all users, and much more useful than I expected it to be. I decided to ditch NotebookLM for a while and move my study and research workflow into ChatGPT to see if Study Mode could handle it...

What is ChatGPT’s Study Mode?

A study partner you didn’t know you needed

ChatGPT’s Study Mode is basically a learning environment built right into the chat interface. Instead of prompting the AI and having it throw all the answers right back at you, this mode structures your chats like guided study sessions. This OpenAI blog post described it as “a learning experience that helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer.” The goal is to help people make sense of the answers rather than just having it spoonfed to them.

ChatGPT wrote the Study Mode system instructions in collaboration with teachers and scientists to ensure real learning, while keeping it interactive and customized to your objectives. So when you use it, ChatGPT will actually ask you questions back, and also structure its responses in a way that helps you learn, rather than just help you finish a task or get a quick answer. Personally, I think this is a fantastic way to leverage AI without having it do all the work for you.

How ChatGPT’s Study Mode compares to NotebookLM

Two different learning styles

The biggest difference between NotebookLM and ChatGPT’s Study Mode is how they approach knowledge. Study Mode draws on ChatGPT’s massive body of pre-trained knowledge without requiring you to upload notes or documents. You can provide your own material, but it’s not necessary - you can just jump right in with prompts and have structured, context-aware conversations. So you can start a study session immediately without the extra step of collecting and uploading sources.

NotebookLM, on the other hand, works with the notes and documents you provide. This is both a strength and a weakness compared to Study Mode. It’s more inconvenient, but it assures that you’re working with verifiable, referenceable resources. The convenience of Study Mode has a trade-off: it doesn’t always or automatically cite sources, and there’s no built-in way to fact-check its responses within the app. You’re relying entirely on the model’s knowledge, which is often accurate but occasionally prone to hallucinations. So in a way, Study Mode’s convenience isn’t that convenient, because you need to take the time to fact-check the answers.

How I’ve been using ChatGPT’s Study Mode

Ditching NotebookLM for interactive learning

Most of the demonstrations I’ve seen of Study Mode use it for math problems. That’s not my area - I’m studying UX design. So I already felt a little intimidated going in, since I haven’t seen anyone use it in this context. But I quickly noticed that Study Mode adapts to whatever you’re learning; it just needs direction. I started with a simple prompt to gauge how it actually differs from both NotebookLM and regular ChatGPT chats - “what can you tell me about user experience research?”

It gave me a quick, concise overview. But the biggest difference is that it actually asked me a question back - “have you already learned about or tried doing a usability test or user interview?” It was trying to gauge my understanding of the topic instead. So I told it my exact level of understanding and where I was in my UX studies. The difference between Study Mode and regular ChatGPT is that it keeps engaging with me, nudging me to provide more information and ask more questions.

The most use I get out of it is when it starts quizzing me. Every time I give my answer, it tells me whether I’m right or wrong, with an explanation. And then it keeps the questions coming. Unlike NotebookLM’s Quiz feature, the cool thing about Study Mode is that I can add more questions and prompts to my quiz answers, directing the study session into whichever topic I need. This allowed me to actually use it for some of my design course tests - it didn’t just give me the answers, it helped me understand, while still allowing me to guide the direction of the session.

So it does retain that ChatGPT-style conversational flow, but with a focus on learning rather than just chatting. It constantly checks on what I do and don’t know, which makes me engage with the material and get to the answers on my own instead of passively reading the answers.

Will Study Mode replace NotebookLM for me?

Not entirely. NotebookLM still shines for its structured research, ability to let you use verifiable sources, and long-term note management - Study Mode can’t fully replicate these things. But for active and interactive learning, retention, personalization, and exploring concepts in a conversational way, ChatGPT’s Study Mode comes out on top and has already taken over much of my workflow. My next move will probably be combining the two so they compliment each other rather than compete for my attention.