Google's Notebook AI Can Now Read the Manual With You

Google has added a feature called Expert Intelligence to its Gemini Notebook AI tool, the note-taking assistant formerly known as NotebookLM. The update, reported by The Verge on 28 August 2026, lets users chat directly with expert-authored books and technical sources, rather than being limited to documents they upload themselves. For a UK business owner, that turns a search tool into something closer to an on-call technical adviser.

What it means for your hours and margin

Think about how often someone on your team has to dig through a manufacturer's manual, a British Standard, or a supplier spec sheet to answer one specific question. A quantity surveyor checking a clause before pricing a variation. A site manager confirming a tolerance before signing off work. That kind of look-up rarely takes two minutes — it usually takes fifteen or twenty, because the document is long and the index is useless.

Say that happens three times a week for someone on £35 an hour fully loaded. Twenty minutes a search, three times a week, is an hour lost weekly — roughly 50 hours a year, or around £1,750 in wages spent just finding information you already own. That is before you count the cost of getting the answer wrong because someone skimmed the wrong clause under time pressure and it turned into rework.

Being able to ask a plain question and get pointed to the actual page, rather than scrolling a PDF, is the kind of small, boring saving that adds up across a team. It will not win you new work on its own. It will get quotes out faster and reduce the chance of a costly misread on site.

What to do this month

• Pick one manual, spec book or standard your team refers to weekly and test the feature on it before trusting it on a live job.
• Check every answer against the actual clause the first few times — treat it as a fast first draft, not a final ruling.
• Do not feed it live commercial contracts or pricing you have not checked Google's data handling terms for.
• If it genuinely cuts look-up time, roll it out to whoever spends the most time buried in documentation. If it does not, drop it — there is no subscription commitment described that locks you in.