Google Gemini (Free) and NotebookLM

Google Gemini’s free tier is an AI assistant designed to enhance productivity and creativity. It can be used for tasks such as drafting emails, summarizing documents, and generating creative content. By leveraging its capabilities, users can save time and effort while ensuring clear and professional communication.

NotebookLM is also part of the Google Gemini (Free) offering. NotebookLM is research and note-taking tool that helps analyze, summarize, and interact with uploaded documents using the Gemini language models. NotebookLM allows you to upload sources like PDFs, Google Docs, websites, and even YouTube videos, then generates summaries, answers questions, and create audio overviews to help you understand and organize information more effectively. It allows you to synthesize data from multiple sources and understand the relationships between them.

Here’s what you can do with Google Gemini (Free):

  • Generate Text Responses: Help you write emails, reports, or any text, using its understanding of language and context.
  • Create Images: You can describe an image you need in plain language, and Gemini will generate it for you using its own AI model for image generation.
  • Chat with Uploaded Documents: You can upload documents or images directly into the chat. Gemini can then help you by extracting information, answering questions about the content, or assisting with document-based tasks.
Chat with Google Gemini

Here’s what you can do with NotebookLM:

  • Create topic-specific notebooks by uploading or linking up to 50 sources per notebook, including text-based documents, YouTube videos, audio files, and websites.
  • Ask questions about the sources and and follow citation links to the sources where the topics appear.
  • Summarize key points and identify connections between ideas across different sources.
  • Curate a podcast-like audio recording that discusses the content of your sources.
  • Share notebooks with other users who are logging in to NotebookLM with Yale Google Workspace (EliApps) accounts.
Access NotebookLM

Details

Availability: These tools are available to staff, faculty, and students at Yale (provided that they are above 18 years of age).

Pricing: Free to students, faculty and staff.

Privacy and Protection: Thesee tools include privacy and protection measures to ensure data security. They are approved for moderate risk data when signed in with your Yale Google Workspace (EliApps) account. If you sign in with a personal Google account, these tools are approved for only low risk data.

How to Access

Access Chat with Google Gemini and log in with your Yale Google Workspace account. If you do not currently have a Yale Google Workspace (EliApps) account, and cannot sign in, you can contact the ITS Help Desk to have an account created.

Access NotebookLM and log in with your Yale Google Workspace account. If you do not currently have a Yale Google Workspace (EliApps) account, and cannot sign in, you can contact the ITS Help Desk to have an account created.

Training Material

To get started using Gemini, please refer to the following user guide.

To learn more about NotebookLM, see the NotebookLM FAQs and help page.

How Do I Get Support?

If you are experiencing an issue with your use of Gemini that is not addressed by the content on this website, please reach out in the following ways.

Comparing Clarity and Google Gemini (free tier)

Attributes Google Gemini (free tier) Clarity Platform
GPT Large Language Model  Google’s Gemini AI model. OpenAI’s GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, o3, and DALL·E 3, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude Sonnet 4, and Google’s Gemini Pro 2.5 and Flash 2.5

(see a comparison of Clarity agents using the different models)
Able to search the web and provide links and citations in its response generation  ✓   
File upload  ✓ 
 		 ✓ 
GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini agents only
(see details on working with files in Clarity)
File upload limits

Maximum files per prompt: 10

Maximum size per file: 100 MB

For videos, the max size is 2 GB per video. Max duration is 5 minutes total per prompt.

 No limit on number of file uploads but a maximum file size of 512MB per file 
File upload from OneDrive   ✓ 
Image generation ✓  ✓ 
Chat limits

Gemini Free operates under a sliding capacity model, meaning your usage is tracked in the background and limits are triggered based on:

Prompt length and complexity

Number and size of uploaded files

Use of advanced tools (e.g., Deep Research, code folders)

Invisible quota: Users are not shown a specific counter. Instead, Gemini will notify you with messages like: “You’ve reached your capacity, try again later.”

Cooldown periods: After hitting a limit, you typically will get a message indicating when you will be able to continue chatting again.

 No limits 
Chat history Chats are saved for 18 months by default and can be accessed using the chat search feature.  Every chat is saved and can be accessed later in the chat history panel 
Costs Free  Free 
Availability Staff, faculty, and students (18 years of age or above) with Google Workspace (EliApps) accounts. Staff, faculty, and students 
Data risk classification  Moderate risk data High risk data, with some exceptions such as ePHI. Refer to Clarity Platform Security for more information
Vendor  Google The Clarity Platform is built on FoundationaLLM from Solliance 

Comparing Google Gemini (free) and NotebookLM

While Google Gemini (free) is a general purpose chatbot that supports file uploads, NotebookLM allows users to  create collections of documents and other information about specific topics which can then be interacted with via chat and used to create audio and video summaries. 

Google Gemini saves all of your conversations so they can be accessed at any time. NotebookLM preserves the documents and other files you have uploaded to a notebook but it will not save all of your conversatons. If you ask a question and wish to save the response, you can save it as a note within the notebook, but your conversations will not be available after you close your session. 

NotebookLM allows you to create as many as 100 notebooks with up to 50 sources each and 500,000 words per source or up to 200MB of files. NotebookLM has daily limits of 50 chat queries and 3 audio generations.