Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) for Meeting Notes and Minutes

Every meeting tool makes a transcript. Google Meet saves one to Drive, Zoom and Teams offer a download, and Granola or ChatGPT’s Meetings plugin write notes while you talk. None of them is good at the question that comes three months later: what did we actually decide about the rollout date, and who said they’d send the contract? This guide shows how to turn transcripts and recordings into meeting notes you can question in Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM). You’ll get one notebook per client or project, a naming scheme, prompts for minutes, decisions and action items, and the limits to plan around.

People search for exactly this setup. In the Google autocomplete suggestions we pulled on October 26, 2026, “notebooklm meeting” completed to notes, minutes, transcript, summary and recording, plus “zoom meeting” and “teams meeting”. When we analyzed the 776 answers to the Kortex MCP waitlist survey (Sep 19 to Oct 1, 2026, then in private beta), 10 of them mentioned meeting notes, transcripts or minutes. That’s a small group, but a specific one. One person described a script that saves each meeting’s emailed files into a dated Drive folder. Then they named the step that breaks: “I then have to manually go to the Notebook and add those assets to the specific notebook (which I never remember to do)”.

Key Takeaways

• Gemini Notebook doesn’t join calls. It works from the transcript or recording afterwards, and it transcribes audio files when you import them (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026).
• Use one notebook per client or project and one source per meeting, named date first.
• Ask for minutes with one meeting selected, and for decisions across all of them.
• A free notebook holds 50 sources, so a weekly meeting fills one in under a year.
• Asking across several notebooks takes a tool like Kortex MCP’s ask_library, which asks up to three.

Can Gemini Notebook take meeting notes for you?

Not during the call. Gemini Notebook has no meeting bot, and none of Google’s help pages describe a way for it to join Zoom, Meet or Teams. Instead, it works after the meeting, from text or audio you give it. Its chat answers “only use data from your sources” and cite “direct quotes, text, and images from your sources” (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). For meetings, that’s the whole point. “Who agreed to what” comes back with the line from the transcript, so you can check it instead of trusting a summary.

So the job splits in two. One tool captures the meeting, and Gemini Notebook becomes the archive you question later. Here’s where transcripts come from, and how each one gets into a notebook.

Capture tool	What it gives you	How it gets into Gemini Notebook
Google Meet transcripts	A Google Doc in the organizer’s Drive	Add it from Drive; it stays synced.
Meet “Take notes for me”	A notes Doc with a summary, decisions and next steps	Add it from Drive.
Zoom audio transcript	A VTT file next to the cloud recording	Paste it as copied text, or save a copy as .txt.
Teams transcript	A .docx or .vtt download	Upload the .docx.
Granola	Notes and transcripts in Granola	Copy them in, or let your AI assistant carry them.
ChatGPT Meetings plugin	Notes with a summary and suggested action items	Copy the notes in as text.
Gemini Notebook mobile recorder	A transcript of up to an hour	It’s saved as a source already.
Any recording file	MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4 and more	Upload it; Gemini Notebook transcribes it.

Sources: Google Meet Help, Zoom Support, Microsoft Support, Granola, the OpenAI Help Center and Gemini Notebook Help, each linked in the sections below.

Each capture tool has its own requirements. Meet transcripts, for instance, need an eligible Workspace edition, such as Business Standard or Workspace Individual. Zoom transcripts need a paid Zoom account with cloud recording and audio transcription turned on. Granola, by contrast, transcribes your computer’s audio, so it “doesn’t invite a bot” to the call (Granola, 2026).

How do you add a meeting transcript or recording to Gemini Notebook?

Pick the route that matches where the transcript lives. Text transcripts make the cleanest sources, while recordings work when there’s no transcript at all.

Google Meet transcripts and Gemini notes

Meet saves transcripts in the meeting organizer’s Drive, in a “Google Meet” folder with a subfolder per meeting, and emails the host a link when the meeting ends (Google Meet Help, 2026). The file is a Google Doc (Google Workspace Updates, 2022). In Gemini Notebook, select Add sources, choose Drive, and pick one or several transcripts at once. Drive sources then sync on their own: Google says they’re “auto-updated and will sync every few minutes” (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). In practice, if a teammate fixes a misheard name in the Doc, the notebook gets the fix too.

Can’t remember where a transcript went? Type a description, like “transcripts from the Acme weekly sync”, into the source search box and choose Drive. Gemini Notebook’s Fast Research then pulls matching files you can access.

Meet’s “Take notes for me” writes a separate notes Doc with Summary, Decisions, Next steps and Details sections (Google Meet Help, 2026). It’s handy, but it’s already a summary.

Make the transcript the record and treat the notes Doc as optional. If you add both, chat may cite the summary’s wording instead of what was said, and a summary can’t show you the exact words someone used.

Zoom and Teams transcripts

Zoom saves audio transcripts “in VTT format”, as a separate file next to the cloud recording, and the file opens in any text editor (Zoom Support, 2026). Gemini Notebook’s list of files covers Word, text, Markdown, PDF, CSV and PowerPoint, but not VTT. So open the transcript and paste it under Add sources, then Copied text, where you can set the title as you create it. Or save a copy that ends in .txt and upload that.

Teams is simpler. Open the meeting chat, select Recap, then Transcript, and download it. By default, “meeting organizers and co-organizers can download it as a .docx or .vtt file” (Microsoft Support, 2026). Choose .docx, which Gemini Notebook accepts as is. If you’re an attendee rather than the organizer, ask the organizer for the file.

Audio and video recordings

Upload the recording itself. “The audio file is transcribed at the time of import and its text is saved to use as a new source” (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). Supported types include MP3, M4A, WAV, AAC, OGG and MP4, and the help page lists dozens of languages for audio import. Three catches apply. Each uploaded file can be up to 200MB, audio with no speech isn’t supported, and “imports may fail if the audio is low quality”. If a long video is over the size cap, export an audio-only copy from your meeting app and upload that instead.

One gap to know: Google’s help page doesn’t say whether audio imports label who is speaking. If who-said-what matters, as it does for decisions, prefer the meeting app’s own transcript, and check that it names speakers before you upload it.

In-person meetings: the mobile app’s recorder

For a meeting with no laptop open, the Gemini Notebook app on Android or iPhone can record. Open a notebook, go to Sources and select Mic at the bottom, then pause, delete or stop as you go. It handles “a voice recording up to 1 hour long”, keeps recording when the phone locks, and stores only the transcript, “not your original voice recording” (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026).

Google also asks you to “ask permission before you record”, and the law may require it. In the US, for example, federal law allows a recording when one party to the conversation consents (Cornell LII, 18 U.S.C. § 2511). California, by contrast, requires the consent of every party to a confidential conversation (California Penal Code § 632).

How should you set up meeting notebooks?

Use one notebook per client or project: not one per meeting, and not one notebook for everything. Google is blunt about why: “Each notebook is independent. Gemini Notebook can’t access information across multiple notebooks at the same time” (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). Therefore, a notebook is the boundary of every question you can ask. Per-meeting notebooks make “what did we decide across all our calls” impossible. One giant notebook, on the other hand, mixes clients, fills its source cap fast and blurs answers.

Name things so the date does the sorting:

Item	Pattern	Example
Notebook	Client or project, then “Meetings”	Acme: Meetings
One source per meeting	Date first, then the meeting type	2026-10-21 Weekly sync
Running decision log	One Google Doc per notebook	Acme decision log
Next year’s notebook	Same name plus the year	Acme: Meetings 2027

Date-first titles help twice. They sort in order, and they let you name a meeting in a question. Google’s own tip is that “mentioning source names in your query helps Gemini Notebook narrow its search” (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). For example, “in the 2026-10-21 Weekly sync” picks one call out of fifty.

Put a header at the top of each transcript

Before you paste a transcript, add four lines above it. Transcripts often start mid-sentence, and a question like “what changed since September?” is safer with the date inside the text, not only in the title.

Meeting: Acme weekly sync
Date: 2026-10-21
Attendees: Priya (Acme, operations lead), Tom (account manager), Lena (engineer)
Agenda: rollout plan, invoice dispute, single sign-on request

Keep one running decision log

A decision log is a running list of what was agreed, when and by whom. Keep one as a Google Doc called “Acme decision log” in Drive, add it to the notebook once, and paste in each confirmed decision after the call. Since Drive sources sync, the notebook always has the latest version. Alternatively, save a decisions answer from chat as a note. Notes appear in the Sources panel, “can be used for Q&A” and get “cited in Chat responses” like any upload (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026).

How many meetings fit in one notebook?

A free notebook holds 50 sources, Google AI Plus 100, Pro 300, and the two Ultra plans 500 or 600 (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). Each source can run to 500,000 words or 200MB. Do the maths for your cadence. A weekly call adds 52 sources a year, so it fills a free notebook in under a year. A daily standup fills one in about ten working weeks.

Two ways stretch the cap. First, Gemini Notebook pulls a Google Doc with several tabs in “as one source” (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). So an “October 2026 transcripts” Doc with one tab per meeting counts once. The trade-off is that citations then point at the month’s Doc, so keep the date as each tab’s first line. Second, start a fresh notebook each year and carry the decision log into it.

With ten clients, that’s ten to twenty notebooks in a flat list, next to everything else you keep in Gemini Notebook. Native Collections group notebooks, but they add no tags and no nested folders, as our guide to organizing Gemini notebooks explains. As a result, finding “the Acme one” gets slower every month.

Which prompts turn transcripts into minutes, decisions and action items?

Two habits make every prompt below work better. First, select only the sources a question needs; Google lets you pick them one by one in the Sources panel. Second, save answers you’ll want again. Save to note keeps “tables and clickable inline citations” (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). Swap in your own names and dates.

Minutes for one meeting

Select only that meeting’s source, then ask:

Write minutes for the 2026-10-21 Weekly sync only. Use these headings: Attendees, Topics discussed, Decisions, Action items (owner, task, due date), Open questions. Quote the transcript for every decision. If an owner or a date wasn't said out loud, write "not stated" instead of guessing.

The “not stated” line matters most. Minutes that invent a plausible owner or deadline are worse than minutes with a gap, because nobody checks the plausible ones.

A decision log across every meeting

Select every meeting source in the notebook:

List every decision made in these meetings, oldest first. For each one, give the date, the decision in one sentence, who agreed, and a citation. Mark any decision that a later meeting changed or reversed, and cite both meetings.

An action-item tracker you can export

For a table rather than prose, use a Data Table in the Studio panel. Select the pencil icon to customize it and describe the rows and columns you want. Then Export to Sheets puts the table in the first tab and its citations in the second (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026).

One row per action item. Columns: date raised, owner, task, due date, status (done, open or unclear), and the meeting it came from.

What did we decide about X across all meetings?

This is the question the archive exists for. Ask for a timeline, not a verdict:

What have we decided about the single sign-on rollout across all of these meetings? Answer as a timeline: date, what was said, who said it, with a citation for each point. End with what is still undecided.

A timeline beats a single answer because decisions drift. Consider a launch date agreed in March, moved in May and quietly dropped in July. A one-line answer might pick any of the three, while a cited timeline shows the latest one and the path to it.

Make the notebook answer like a minute-taker

In the Chat panel, select Configure Chat and choose Custom, which lets you set a role for the notebook (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). Paste something like this:

You are the minute-taker for this client's meetings. Answer in short bullet points, name the meeting date for every claim, keep decisions separate from discussion, and never infer an owner or a deadline that nobody said.

For a monthly summary, a custom Report in the Studio panel works well, and Export to Docs sends it to Google Docs for the team.

How do you ask across several clients’ meetings?

Gemini Notebook can’t do it on its own, since each notebook is independent. The manual route is to run the same question in each notebook and compare the answers yourself. That’s fine for two clients, but it’s tedious for ten.

Kortex MCP is the Kortex connection that lets AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT work with your notebooks. Its ask_library tool asks one question across up to three notebooks, picked by id, tag or collection. Each notebook’s answer comes back separately with its own citations (Kortex MCP docs, 2026). Kortex MCP is included with Kortex Pro and Lifetime. Our guide to connecting Gemini Notebook to Claude and ChatGPT covers the setup.

Ask my notebooks tagged #client what each client said about renewal pricing in our meetings. Show each notebook's answer separately with its citations, and flag anything still open.

Separate answers matter here. A blended paragraph can’t show you that one client agreed to a price that another pushed back on, while three labelled answers make that obvious. For more than three notebooks, ask in batches. Alternatively, let search_everything find which notebooks mention the topic first.

How can Claude or ChatGPT file each transcript into the right notebook?

Let your AI assistant fetch the transcript and Kortex MCP carry it in. Kortex MCP is a bridge. Your assistant reads whatever it can already reach with its own connectors, and Kortex MCP takes that text into Gemini Notebook, or brings notebook answers back out. Kortex itself never joins, records or reads your meetings.

The connectors exist on the capture side. Zoom’s own connector for Claude can reach “transcripts, summaries, next steps” from cloud-recorded meetings, for hosts and people the host gave access (Zoom Developer Docs, 2026). Granola’s MCP server works with Claude, ChatGPT and Claude Code, and fetches full transcripts on paid Granola plans (Granola Docs, 2026). Meanwhile, a Drive connector reads Meet transcripts, and Meet emails the host a link to each one, which lands in Gmail. Most people’s assistants already reach those last two:

With Kortex MCP connected, one request does the filing. Behind it, add_text_source adds the transcript (or add_google_doc links a Meet Doc), ask_question asks the notebook, and save_chat_to_note keeps the answer with its citations (Kortex MCP docs, 2026). Here’s a request to copy:

Find today's Acme weekly sync in Granola and get the full transcript. Add it as a text source to my Gemini notebook "Acme: Meetings", titled with today's date and "Weekly sync", with the date and attendees at the top. Then ask that notebook for this meeting's decisions and action items, with citations, and save the answer as a note.

That’s the step the waitlist respondent kept forgetting, done in the same chat where the transcript arrived. If the transcript is in your inbox instead, our guide to adding Gmail emails to Gemini Notebook shows the same bridge for email.

A schedule can handle the weekly follow-up, too. For example:

Every Friday at 4, ask my "Acme: Meetings" notebook for open action items by owner and save the answer as a note.

Schedules run hourly, daily or weekly from your Chrome, which has to be running, though it can sit minimised (Kortex docs, 2026). However, they only work inside your notebooks. A schedule can’t fetch a new transcript from Zoom or Granola by itself, so that step stays with your assistant.

No AI assistant in the loop? Kortex’s own rules on Pro still help. The automation docs include a two-rule meeting setup: tag a notebook #meeting, and Kortex adds #work and #action-items and creates Agenda, Decisions, Action Items and Follow-ups notes in it. The Domain Router also sends saved links to a notebook by matching their URL. In addition, the Kortex button inside ChatGPT and Claude sends a chat to a notebook, so a call you summarised there can join the archive in one click.

What are the limits of Gemini Notebook for meetings?

Most limits are about capture, not questions. Plan around these:

• No live notes. Gemini Notebook doesn’t join calls, and neither does Kortex. Something else has to produce the transcript.
• The recorder takes an hour per recording. It keeps the transcript, not the audio, so you can’t replay a disputed line later.
• Audio imports have rules. The cap is 200MB per file, speech is required, and quality matters. Speaker labels aren’t documented.
• Source caps. The limit is 50 sources per notebook on the free plan and up to 600 on Ultra.
• One notebook per question. Cross-notebook questions need a workaround: the same question asked in each notebook, or ask_library for up to three.
• Capture tools have their own plans. Meet transcripts need an eligible Workspace edition. “Take notes for me” needs an eligible Workspace edition or Google AI plan. OpenAI lists the Meetings plugin for the ChatGPT desktop app on Mac.
• Consent is on you. OpenAI’s help page warns that its Meetings plugin doesn’t notify other participants for you, and Google asks you to get permission before recording.
• Usage limits apply. Your quota “refreshes every 5 hours until you reach your weekly limit”, and long chats use more of it (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026).

Client calls are often confidential, so the privacy terms matter too. Google says your data “is not used to train Gemini Notebook unless you provide feedback”. Work and school accounts, in addition, aren’t reviewed by human reviewers even when you give feedback (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026).

How do you get minutes out of Gemini Notebook?

Gemini Notebook exports a little on its own. A note goes to Google Docs with Export to Docs, a report does the same, and a Data Table goes to Sheets (Gemini Notebook Help, 2026). Chat can also create downloadable documents, including PDF, Word and Markdown files, though Google calls these functions “experimental and in early development”. What it doesn’t have is a button that saves a whole chat, or a notebook’s sources, as files.

Kortex is a free Chrome extension we built for Gemini Notebook, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. It adds Export buttons to the chat, the Studio panel and the sources. You can save a minutes chat as Markdown for Notion, or every note and artifact in the Studio panel at once as PDF, Markdown or a ZIP. The free plan includes 10 exports a day, and Pro removes the cap. Our guide to exporting from Gemini Notebook compares every route.

In short: capture with the meeting tool you already use, file each transcript into one notebook per client, and ask for decisions with citations instead of rereading calls.

Frequently asked questions

Can NotebookLM take meeting notes during a call?

No. Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) doesn’t join Zoom, Meet or Teams calls. You add the transcript or recording after the meeting, and it answers questions from it with citations. For in-person meetings, its mobile app can record up to an hour and save the transcript as a source.

Can NotebookLM transcribe a meeting recording?

Yes. When you upload an audio file, Gemini Notebook transcribes it at import and keeps the text as a source. MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4 and many other formats work, up to 200MB per file. Recordings with no speech aren’t supported, and low-quality audio may fail to import.

How do I add a Zoom meeting transcript to NotebookLM?

Zoom saves cloud recording transcripts as VTT files, and VTT isn’t on Gemini Notebook’s list of supported files. Open the file in a text editor and paste it as copied text, or save a copy as .txt and upload that. You can also upload the recording’s audio and let Gemini Notebook transcribe it.

How do I add a Teams meeting transcript to NotebookLM?

Open the meeting chat in Teams, select Recap, then Transcript, and download it as a .docx file. Organizers and co-organizers can download it by default. Upload the .docx to your meeting notebook, renamed with the meeting date first so it sorts and cites cleanly.

Can NotebookLM search across all my meetings?

Across the meetings in one notebook, yes: chat answers from every selected source and cites each one. Across notebooks, no, because each notebook is independent. Kortex MCP’s ask_library tool asks up to three notebooks at once from Claude or ChatGPT, and it’s included with Kortex Pro and Lifetime.

How many meeting transcripts can one notebook hold?

As many as your source limit allows: 50 per notebook on the free plan, 100 on Google AI Plus, 300 on Pro and 500 or 600 on Ultra. A weekly meeting fills a free notebook in under a year. A Google Doc with one tab per meeting counts as a single source.

---

Editorial note: fact-checked against the official help pages and docs linked above on October 26, 2026. Spotted something out of date? Contact us and we will fix it, or read more about Kortex.