Google Just Made Tutoring Free for Everyone!

Okay, so Google is reworking their Gemini product, and as a part of that, we had a big release recently called Gemini Study Notebooks. And I think this is really significant because one-on-one tutoring is just one of the big things that has been available to people who can afford it, while everybody could benefit from it. And I think Study Notebooks actually doesn't just close the gap for people who cannot afford tutoring, it's also a brand new way to think about topics, to learn about topics, and a way to interact with information. This workflow is unique, and Google is trying hard to bring unique things to Gemini to compete. So that's why today we'll be looking at, well, a brand new study notebook feature. And the best part is that you can complete everything I do in this video for free. So if you have a Google account, you now have access to this private one-on-one tutoring app. And it's a concrete feature that you're looking for called Gemini Study Notebook. So let me show you how to get the most out of this. So study notebooks, they're basically a new type of notebook. You might already be familiar with notebooks from NotebookLM. However, this now lives inside of the Gemini app. And notebooks are basically like a folder that you put certain files and sources into. Okay. They're customizable compartmentalized spaces. Try saying that one 5 times in a row. Customizable compartmentalized spaces. Customizable compartmentalized spaces. Customizable compartmentalized spaces. Not bad. These spaces let you customize the context, upload sources, and keep keep your chats siloed off from the rest of the chats in your account. It's siloed, okay? So while study notebooks might be a new type of notebook, they're still siloed. And these help you build a study plan. But not just that, they really identify the gaps in your knowledge. And that's why I love these so much. So you're gonna see these are useful in many scenarios. It's not just for studying for university, it's literally just if you're exploring something where you're not sure what you know and what you don't know, these are useful. So let's get you set up. So as I mentioned, all you need to do this is a personal Google account. And this works only on the web right now. So pull up a desktop computer or a laptop to see this feature. Once in gemini.google.com/app, here you click New Notebook. And this is the interesting piece. You'll see two options. One's a regular notebook. And the other one is this new option called Study. That's what this video is about. We'll select Study. And now for the topic, let's go with something a lot of people search for, SAT prep. If you're not familiar, it's a standardized US test before college. It's just a large thing that people are learning about and moving towards. Now you could obviously recontextualize this to your life. So type something like, help me prepare for the SAT reading section. That's a concrete piece of the SAT tests. And if you have any notes, PDFs, maybe a practice book file sitting in your Google Drive, this is also where you'd upload them and Gemini will build your plan around that material. You can add websites, you can add YouTube videos, all of these things can be added here in sources and think of it as just curating a folder of stuff that is relevant to what you're learning. Okay, from here, Gemini is going to follow up with a question or two to help narrow things down. It's important you answer these accurately. And then as you confirm, give it a few seconds to finish setting up. And voilà, there it is. One important thing to note, once you create a study notebook like we just have here, you can't go back and you can't change the goal. You would need to create a new one. Now this video is about using AI to work with you, right? You're improving your knowledge side by side with AI. But I know that many people are interested in AI working for you where you let it do something and it plans it all out and just does it. And the interesting thing is that just recently, this has become very feasible for mere mortals that are non-technical. Concretely, I'm talking about the new feature ChatGPT Work. And if you haven't tried that yet, that thing can do work for you. You just have to know what to ask. And exactly for that reason, I created a resource with my top 10 use cases that you can run through ChatGPT Work. Some of them free, some of them required a $20 plan. But if you're interested in that, I put all of that into a PDF that you can get from the first link in this video's description. It's free, so get it right now. And now let's get back to our video about Gemini Study Notebooks. So once your notebook is ready, this is where the interesting part begins. The first thing you'll want to do is click Take Quiz. This is not a test you're trying to pass. Think of it more like a calibration or a new tutor figuring out where you're actually at and where the gaps are. So go ahead and work through the questions as they come up. And once you're done, you'll get a score. But honestly, don't get too hung up on the number itself. The real value here is how it adapts your notebook based on the results of the quiz. Because now in the next step, you land on your dashboard. And this is where Study Notebooks really shows what it can do and why I'm so excited about this. Everything you just got quizzed on gets sorted into 3 buckets: strengths, focus areas, and not started. So behind the scenes, Gemini is actually tracking over 100 different specific skills, not just handling one overall grade. And that's what makes this plan that this creates for you genuinely personalized and your progress tangible. From here, you can click on one of these focus areas, and this kicks off a short personalized lesson built around the exact gap. This is where your learning begins. When you work through this, at the end, there's a little follow-up quiz to see if you actually got that information. You score well, and the topic will flip from focus area over into one of your strengths. You're up, and your dashboard changes. This makes it feel like a little game where you're just progressing towards growth in this knowledge area. And that's really the core engine of this whole tool. You set up your notebook with a topic, and then you work on moving these focus areas into your strengths. You take a lesson, you complete a quiz, and your dashboard updates. And then you repeat. Okay, so that's the core, but here's one thing that is easy to miss about these. Well, you'll have to step right outside of the core application here. Just go to notebooklm.google.com. And within here, you get more functionality. And all these notebooks basically carry over one-to-one. So you can just go in here, select that notebook, and you can see the same sources on the left. But here on the right side, this is different. You can now create these different short videos, audio overviews, and presentations, all these different formats based on your sources. So it's the same sources, same notebooks, same siloed approach to the information that you put into those sources. But the goal and the output is different. You're creating these different media formats rather than trying to increase your own knowledge. Personal favorite, audio overviews. It basically creates a little personalized podcast for you. Also a great way to learn about something. And then maybe you can go back into the study notebook and take the quiz. About even doing the lesson because you consumed the podcast. Again, fully optional. And that's Study Notebooks. It's just a new modality in AI that I think is really interesting. If I had a kid, I would show this to them right away. But I do recommend you try it yourself so you get a feeling for what the future of learning might look like once AI gets involved in the mix. Because this is a powerful product, but it's really just the beginning of a new world where everybody can get something akin to one-on-one tutoring eventually. All right, my name is Igor Pogany, and I hope you have a wonderful day.