Google's NotebookLM is hands down my favorite AI tool. Frankly, it's also my go-to productivity companion. It's packed with genuinely useful features and stands out from every other AI app I've tried. Thanks to its source-grounded nature, it doesn't hallucinate nearly as often as most AI models do.

But for all the things NotebookLM gets right (which I could write about all day), there are still a few things about the tool that bug me. Well, it seems like today’s my lucky day. One thing in particular that’s bugged me a lot about the app is finally getting fixed.

Your NotebookLM conversations won’t disappear anymore

Today, Google announced a range of improvements to NotebookLM’s Chat functionality via a post on Google’s The Keyword blog. Among the changes (which I’ll talk about later below), Google revealed that NotebookLM will now save your conversation history. This means you can now close a notebook when you’re done interacting with it, and when you open it again, your previous chats will still be there, allowing you to pick up right where you left off.

Now, if you aren't a frequent NotebookLM user, you might think: don’t all AI tools already do that? And you’d be right. Most AI tools indeed do. But until now, NotebookLM hasn’t saved any chat history at all. This meant that every time you reopened a notebook, your past conversations were gone for good. Even when you simply refreshed your browser, your entire chat would disappear. This made using NotebookLM for ongoing projects or study sessions unnecessarily frustrating.

NotebookLM currently lets you share your private notebooks with others. In any such notebooks, your conversation history will only be available to you. You can also delete your chat history anytime if you’d like to start fresh. Unfortunately, conversation history isn’t out just yet. In the blog post, Google mentioned that it will start rolling out to users over the next week.

NotebookLM is getting some major performance upgrades

Other than conversation history, Google also announced a few improvements it made that boost performance and overall response quality. The company claims that it’s seen a “50% improvement in user satisfaction with responses that use larger amounts of sources” since it started testing the improvements.

First up, Google has “significantly expanded NotebookLM’s processing capabilities, conversation context, and history.” It’s now enabled the full 1 million token context of Gemini in NotebookLM chat across both free and premium plans, which the company explains improves NotebookLM’s performance when analyzing large document collections significantly. The company has also increased its capacity for “multiturn conversation more than sixfold.”

Additionally, Google has enhanced how NotebookLM finds information from within your sources. The AI tool now explores the sources you’ve uploaded from multiple angles to deliver a more satisfactory response. Google also announced that the ability to customize the Chat feature is now available to all users.

While all of the performance upgrades make NotebookLM more capable under the hood, I’m most excited about the conversation history feature.