I spend an unhealthy amount of time defending Google’s ecosystem’s utility to individuals, even when the company seems determined to lock down previously open platforms and abandon perfectly functional software at will. However, I’ll give credit where it’s due, and Google AI tools like Gemini and NotebookLM justify the immense hype surrounding them. Instead of treating a random conspiracy theorist from 2012 as gospel, NotebookLM sticks to the sources you’ve fed it, making it powerful and well-controlled for targeted research and understanding complex subjects from sources you trust.