Look Back on Your Audio Diary with Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM)

Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) is Google’s notebook that answers only from the sources you add. Add your Ayumi audio diary as a source, ask “What was weighing on me most last month?”, and it answers by quoting the days you talked about it. It can also turn a month of entries into an Audio Overview, a conversation between two hosts about your month.

Ayumi saves every entry as a Markdown file, and Gemini Notebook accepts Markdown uploads. This guide bundles your journal into one file per month and adds it as a source.

How it fits together

Record your audio diary on iPhone or Apple Watch
  ↓ Ayumi transcribes and saves
Journal folder in iCloud Drive (Markdown, organized by date)
  ↓ iCloud syncs to your Mac
Bundle one month into a single Markdown file on your Mac
  ↓ Upload in a browser
A notebook in Gemini Notebook
  → Ask questions, generate Audio Overviews and mind maps

1. Decide what to add

Ayumi keeps your journal out of anyone’s account by default. This guide deliberately puts a copy into your Google account, so decide first how much of it goes there, and where you will use it.

Uploaded files are stored in your Google account. You can add only certain months or certain entries.
Entries include their context. The frontmatter can hold location coordinates, place names, and weather. See Markdown Format.
Use a personal Google account. With a work or school account, your data is handled under your organization’s agreement, and related settings are controlled by your administrator.

What Google says about your data

The following summarizes Google’s Privacy and Terms of Use in Gemini Notebook, Notebooks in Gemini Apps, and public notebooks as of October 2026. The original terms apply, not this summary, so read them before adding anything.

Inside Gemini Notebook

On personal accounts, Google says your sources and chats are not used to directly train its foundational models unless you give feedback.
Rating a response can put it in front of people. A thumbs up or down sends the related prompts, sources, and outputs to specially trained teams for review, disconnected from your account, and keeps them for up to three years. Do not rate responses in a notebook that holds your journal.
Answers are grounded only in your sources.

When opened in the Gemini app

Chats follow the Gemini app’s Keep Activity setting. With it on, Gemini app chats are used to improve Google services, including training generative AI models, and some are read by human reviewers. Answers that quote your journal are part of those chats. See Use Your Journal with Gemini Personal Intelligence for details.
Answers may draw on web search and other tools, not only your sources.

When sharing

Do not share a journal notebook. Setting Share to “Anyone with a link” lets anyone with a Google account open it. Google notes that even Chat View, which hides sources, may not stop viewers from reaching them. Make sure access under Share is Restricted.

When you stop

Deleting a notebook deletes its sources. The deletion syncs to the Gemini app.
Delete Gemini app chats separately. Deleting a notebook leaves its Gemini app chats in place. Turning off Keep Activity or deleting your Gemini Apps Activity does not delete anything in Gemini Notebook.
Data collected through feedback stays for up to three years, even after you delete the notebook.

2. Bundle a month into one file

Ayumi saves each entry as its own file. A notebook on the free plan holds up to 50 sources, but each source can be up to 500,000 words. Bundling one month per file lets you add years of journaling without hitting the source limit.

Plan	Sources per notebook
Free	50
Plus	100
Pro	300

Limits are from Google’s plan limits.

Bundle on your Mac

Use a folder in iCloud Drive as your Ayumi journal folder and open it on your Mac. See Sync with iCloud. This guide calls the folder AyumiJournal.
In Finder, right-click the folder and choose Keep Downloaded, so every entry is a real file rather than a cloud placeholder.
Run the following in Terminal. Change MONTH to the month you want.

JOURNAL="$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/AyumiJournal"
MONTH="2026/10"
OUT="$HOME/Desktop/ayumi-${MONTH//\//-}.md"
find "$JOURNAL/$MONTH" -name '*.md' -not -path '*.assets/*' | sort | while IFS= read -r f; do
  printf '\n\n# %s\n\n' "$(basename "$f" .md)"
  cat "$f"
done > "$OUT"

This creates ayumi-2026-10.md on your Desktop. Each entry starts with its file name (a timestamp such as 2026-10-01_08-10) as a heading, so citations show which day they came from. Attachment folders (.assets) are left out.

3. Add the file to a notebook

On your Mac, open Gemini Notebook in a browser and sign in with your Google account.
Choose Create new notebook.
Use Upload a source (or Add sources later) and pick ayumi-2026-10.md. You can add other months to the same notebook.

An uploaded file is a snapshot. When more entries arrive for that month, run the command again, delete the old source, and add the new file. Deleting an entry in Ayumi does not remove it from the notebook.

Adding the recordings themselves

Gemini Notebook can also take audio files such as .m4a as sources and transcribes them on import. Only the transcript is kept as the source, not the audio. Ayumi entries already contain transcripts, so adding the Markdown is usually enough.

4. Ask about your journal

Answers in the chat come with citations to your sources. Select a citation to jump to that part of your journal.

Read my October journal and list three worries that keep coming up.
For each, quote the entry where it shows most clearly.

Goal	What to ask
Review the month	Summarize it as events, feelings, and open questions
Recall why you decided something	Find the days you talked about a topic and quote your reasons
Notice ups and downs	List upbeat days and low days, with what happened on each
Compare months	Compare what you cared about in September and October
Decide what’s next	List things you said you wanted to do but haven’t started

Gemini Notebook can be wrong or connect unrelated days. Open the cited entry in Ayumi to check anything important.

5. Generate Audio Overviews and mind maps

The Studio panel turns your sources into other kinds of review.

Audio Overview: A conversation between two hosts about your month. Hearing your own words discussed by someone else can surface things you missed in the moment.
Mind map: A diagram of the themes in your journal and how they connect.
Reports: Written summaries you can export to Google Docs.

To get output in another language, change Output Language in Settings. It defaults to your Google account’s language.

Troubleshooting

Problem	What to check
The bundled file is empty or missing entries	The iCloud folder is set to Keep Downloaded, and `MONTH` is written as `2026/10`
You can’t add the source	You are adding Markdown from a browser, not the iPhone app, and the notebook is under its source limit
Recent entries aren’t in the answers	You rebuilt the file, added it, and deleted the old source
Answers or Audio Overviews are in the wrong language	Output Language in Settings

What Is Voice Journaling?: topics to talk about and how to revisit entries
Use Your Journal with Gemini Personal Intelligence: let the Gemini app read your journal through Google Drive
Use Transcripts as Context in Codex and Claude: review your journal with desktop AI apps that read a local folder

Download Ayumi on the App Store

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