Middlebury Tool Updates
NotebookLM
Google announced a variety of updates for NotebookLM.
- Improved slide revisions: You can now revise presentation content slide-by-slide, submitting stylistic or factual feedback that regenerates the deck quickly.
- Cinematic video overviews: A new format that creates immersive, narrated videos with fluid animations from your sources. These are ideal for visualizing complex narratives and academic research.
- New infographic styles: Ten new predefined styles (including Sketch Note, Scientific, Editorial, and Instructional) let you manually choose a visual approach or let NotebookLM auto-select one.
- Improved flashcards and quizzes: Progress now saves across sessions. You can mark flashcards as “Got it” or “Missed it,” shuffle the deck, delete individual cards, and rerun missed items from a results screen.
- More file types: EPUB is now a supported source type, making it easier to work with eBooks. Slide decks can be exported as PPTX.
Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is now available across Teams chats, channels, and meetings, and Copilot now generates video recaps of meetings (narrated highlight reels with short clips from the recording).
Custom Chatbots at Middlebury
Custom chatbots let you combine specific instructions, prompts, and reference materials into a reusable tool. They are useful for creating coaches for students, discipline-specific research assistants, or structured assignment scaffolds. Multiple platforms now support this, and the videos below walk through the setup process in some of the more popular options.
- Microsoft – Copilot Agent
- Google – Gemini Gem
- OpenAI – ChatGPT GPT – not supported by Middlebury but included based on popularity
- Claude – To do this in Claude requires a paid teams account for the creator and users
You can try out the custom chatbots created by Prof. Isabelle Langrock’s sociology students that push the limits of prompting to create strong personalities and very opinionated points of view. Prof. Langrock was a participant in DLINQ’s AI mini-grant program (which is currently accepting applications).
If you have a subscription to the Addison Independent, you can read about the actions of two Middlebury sophomores who have created an AI teaching assistant (TA EDU) that is designed to support Middlebury students. “Eventually, the students are hoping to make TA-EDU available at other schools and apply to accelerators.”
AI in the world
Students and AI use
The Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study (based on a fall 2025 survey of nearly 4,000 college students) found that 57% of college students now use AI at least weekly for their coursework, and about one in five use it daily. More than half (53%) say their school discourages or prohibits AI use. DLINQ has guidance around creating AI policies for your courses and are happy to talk to you about how to create them for your course.
A companion report found that 42% of students have considered changing their major because of AI’s potential impact on the job market, and 16% have already done so.
AI and Coding
As we see more Middlebury community members explore AI and coding, it’s worth noting this distinction between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding. You also see more tools and integrations that allow people to use AI to create code in different ways. The rise of personal software is awesome, but it is important to see the risks as well.
On the AI-assisted-coding side, Google now offers Antigravity, an agent-first development environment. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor supports Copilot natively and has plugins for Claude and ChatGPT. ChatGPT offers the Codex coding agent.
Meanwhile, Lovable, Base44 (used in one of the sociology students’ chatbots reference above), and Replit offer solutions that focus more on vibe coding and also provide built in hosting for the created applications.
OpenAI
OpenAI is shutting down Sora, their AI video creation tool. Sora is described as “a resource black hole” and the platform struggles to prevent non-consensual imagery, realistic misinformation, and major copyright infringement. Sora was reportedly burning roughly $1 million per day in compute costs. Disney’s $1 billion partnership collapsed with the shutdown, reportedly with less than an hour’s notice. Sora shutdown points to a number of difficult AI-related problems that you will likely see play out again.
ChatGPT released a new image model (creatively named ChatGPT Images 2.0) that is markedly improved.
