Google’s NotebookLM has been a welcome tool for anyone trying to do research, study, or just learn more about a topic. The tool can be used to create your own version of an enclosed database, as you control what sources it pulls from in order to answer your prompts. It’s like creating your own large language model and not relying on one to scrape the Internet for answers.
You can use NotebookLM for many tasks, such as reviewing lengthy PDFs and summarizing them, providing you with quizzes and flashcards based on specific material, and breaking down subjects into smaller, more digestible aspects through Mind Maps. NotebookLM takes into account how different people study and research or utilize it for work, and can create a briefing report from a dozen topics to best encapsulate what you’ve read. As the service has expanded, Google has added new features to make it more user-friendly.
Two of the top options are Audio Overviews and Video Overviews. These summarize whatever information you input and create an AI-generated podcast or video that you’re able to share with others or bring with you to help you study or learn on the go. You’ve had the ability to customize these in the past, providing prompts for how the video might look or deciding how many hosts the podcast might have. But now, NotebookLM puts you right in the director’s chair for the Video Overviews.
Creating Video Overviews is simple
Using NotebookLM in general is
In order to create a Video Overview, you have to start with creating a notebook. All you need is one source to draw upon and the notebook can start. Of course, you can feed in many links, PDFs, videos, Sheets, and more as your source materials. But a notebook begins with just one. Once you’ve supplied information to the tool, it will populate the middle section with a title and just a brief description of what you’re researching. The more information that you add, the more it can describe.
The anime one is unique and can make you feel like you’re scrolling through Crunchyroll.
Adding sources is simple — you can even ask Google to discover them on your behalf. What’s great is that you can basically type whatever you’d normally type into Google Search into the Discover bar, and let NotebookLM do the rest. Rather than just flat out telling it what to look up, a few keywords can add more sources to your notebook and make it more powerful and knowledgeable. Once it has the sources that you want, you can use any of NotebookLM’s features to gain a better understanding of the information that it has pulled together. That includes Video Overviews in the top right corner.
The latest feature makes for more fun
Why not make studying more interesting?
You can also customize Audio Overviews by pressing the pencil icon on that feature.
NotebookLM has incorporated the latest AI image editing tool from Google, Nano Banana, into its Video Overviews. Because of this, you’ll be able to now choose what kind of style your Video Overview uses. Previously, the most you could do when customizing a Video Overview was choose the language that it was in and add some simple prompts like focusing on one specific source that you included or what kind of audience it should be presented to. The newest styles that Nano Banana can create videos like are:
- Watercolor
- Papercraft
- Anime
- Whiteboard
- Retro Print
- Heritage
You’ll find these once you hit the pencil on the Video Overview feature and look under the Choose visual style option. There is also a Classic option which will generate the videos that Video Overview has been doing since the installation of the feature. If you’re ever stuck and aren’t sure how you want the Video Overview to look, you can also just have NotebookLM auto select a style based on the content. You can still add what kind of points you want the video to focus on by customizing the prompts within the features.
There are even more video features you can add, too
NotebookLM and Nano Banana are creating something special
As you test out all the style options, one might stand out to you from the others. The anime one is unique and can make you feel like you’re scrolling through a colorful Crunchyroll feed — okay, maybe it’s not up to the levels of Studio Ghibli, but you get what I’m going for here. What’s cool about Video Overviews is that you can now tailor them to fit your needs, whether you’re planning to share them in a presentation or just want to retain the information more effectively. If you’ve used Video Overviews from the start, you know they’ve always provided detailed breakdowns of the topic at hand.
But now, if you don’t want an entire breakdown, you can opt for Brief. This format couples with the style you choose and provides a direct and succinct recap of the points. You won’t get any added filler or fluff, and if you want it to go even deeper, there’s now an Explainer format as well. This will create a longer and more comprehensive video for you to enrich your knowledge. Both are found when you hit the pencil icon in Video Overviews.
Google keeps expanding NotebookLM’s versatility, and it will be interesting to see what the future holds for the helpful tool.
