The team behind NotebookLM just published a new example notebook that turns studying into a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Instead of summarizing or quizzing you on your sources, the notebook role-plays as the famous detective and prompts you to deduce facts, hunt for clues, and reason your way through whatever material you (or the notebook's creator) loaded into it.

It is shipped as a public, shareable notebook rather than a new product feature, which makes it a useful demonstration of how far you can stretch NotebookLM's chat and Studio panel with prompt design alone.

What is actually new

The Sherlock notebook lives in NotebookLM's public-sharing system. Any notebook can be made public and shared with anyone who has a Google account, which Google pitches as a way to make the tool more useful for exploration, understanding and creation. When you open a shared notebook as a viewer, you can read the original sources, ask questions in chat, or consume pre-built artifacts like Audio Overviews and Study Guides, but you cannot generate your own artifacts or add your own sources; the model only answers from the materials the creator provided.