AI is great at summarizing notes and might soon bring them to life too. Plenty of apps use AI to create summaries of your notes, but this upcoming feature in Google’s NotebookLM can do a lot more.
NotebookLM Will Soon Convert Your Notes to Videos
TestingCatalog has spotted a new Video Overviews button in NotebookLM, Google’s AI-powered note-taking tool. This suggests that users may soon be able to generate video summaries of their notes. Given that NotebookLM is developed by Google, these videos are likely to be powered by the company’s latest video generation model, Veo 2.
NotebookLM already has an Audio Overviews feature, which lets you create podcasts from your notes. This feature is one of the reasons why the tool took off in the first place, and if Google can get the video generation working as expected, it can make NotebookLM an indispensable note-taking app.
We don’t know how the final result will look at the moment, but it’s not going to be as simple as treating your notes as prompts to generate videos. Google claims Veo 2 can generate video clips of “several minutes in length,” and it has a better understanding of real-world physics as well as human movement and expressions, so the result can be quite good.
NotebookLM can sometimes generate hour-long podcasts based on your material, so it seems unlikely that the new feature will act as a complete replacement. Instead, Google might be looking to enhance the AI-generated podcasts with a little helping of visual metaphors or small explanations to better visualize and explain more complicated topics.
Audio Overviews often include scripted dialogues between two AI-generated hosts using fixed voices. Given Veo 2’s current limitations, Google can implement a similar template-based system here to get better results.
Video Overviews Are Just the Beginning
Apparently, Video Overviews aren’t all that’s new to NotebookLM. TestingCatalog also spotted UI changes that could make for better content discovery. There’s a new section called Editor’s Picks, implying you could soon be able to browse public notebooks. Given it’s a Google tool, there’s also going to be an element of personalization here, so the feature can give you some interesting reads.
These types of community-driven features can expand NotebookLM from a note-taking and research assistant to a full-blown knowledge-sharing platform, similar to Perplexity’s Discover section. Google seems to be bringing its entire AI ecosystem across mediums—text, voice, and now even video—into a single assistant-like tool that revolves around user-generated content, similar to apps like Notion.
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The Video Overviews feature and UI changes are expected to arrive with NotebookLM’s mobile app release for iOS and Android, planned for May 20. With Google I/O also scheduled to start the same day, these new features will likely be highlight announcements.
NotebookLM is one of the best uses of AI in research or note-taking apps that I’ve seen in some time. I’m genuinely excited to try it out, especially considering how well the Audio Overviews feature works.
