Are you struggling to find key information buried under a mountain of documents every day? Imagine a world where a digital assistant from the future presents the information you need from your own documents as a dynamic video with sound, instantly.

I'm Tak@, a systems integrator who works on various system development projects and enjoys creating web services with generative AI as a hobby. Today, I want to introduce you to a new, futuristic feature recently added to Google's AI tool, NotebookLM: "Video Overview."

The Birth of NotebookLM and its Evolution

We are surrounded by an overwhelming amount of information every day. In learning, research, and business, we spend a lot of time poring over diverse materials like papers, reports, and videos to extract meaningful insights. Google's AI-powered tool, NotebookLM, was born to tackle this modern challenge of "information overload."

NotebookLM is built on Google's multimodal AI model, Gemini, and powerfully supports a range of thought processes, including reading documents, taking notes, answering questions, and organizing ideas. Its standout feature is the concept of "source grounding." This means that instead of pulling information from a vast dataset on the internet, the AI focuses on specific documents you've selected and generates responses and insights based solely on their content. This approach allows the AI to become an "expert" on your provided materials, giving you more accurate, context-aware information.

NotebookLM supports a wide variety of file formats, including Google Docs, Google Slides, PDFs, text files, web pages, and even copied text. You can organize these into "notebooks," managing them like computer folders for each project. A single notebook can hold up to 50 sources and 1,000 notes, enabling you to handle large amounts of information efficiently.

Previously, NotebookLM leveraged its document analysis capabilities to generate diverse educational content such as FAQs, study guides, outlines, briefing documents, and "audio summaries" in a podcast format. For instance, in one case study, a static, 92-page historical manuscript by Mary Easton Sibley, the founder of Lindenwood University, was transformed into a dynamic learning resource as if it had come to life. The ability to summarize transcripts of YouTube videos is also incredibly useful, allowing you to quickly grasp the key points from long-form content. From my experience as a systems integrator, it's rare to find a tool that organizes and presents information in new ways so effortlessly.

The Shock of the "Video Overview" Feature

Then, at Google I/O in May 2025, NotebookLM's latest feature, "Video Overview," was announced. This is a groundbreaking evolution of the previous "audio summary" that automatically creates video content combining narrated slides with visual elements.

The greatest appeal of Video Overview is that static text information is presented with vivid visuals and audio, as if a presentation were happening right in front of you. Specifically, it extracts images, charts, quotes, and key figures from an uploaded document and structures them into narrated slides. This feature is particularly powerful when explaining complex data, demonstrating a process, or concretely illustrating abstract concepts. You can also adjust the content to fit your learning goals or target audience, from vague questions like, "Explain the meaning of the chart in this paper," to specific requests like, "I'm an expert in this field, so please focus on X."

When I saw the demo of Video Overview, I couldn't help but exclaim, "This is truly amazing!" While previous AI-generated videos often felt a bit clunky, the narrator's voice in NotebookLM's Video Overview is incredibly natural, a stark contrast to the robotic tone of conventional AI. The information is narrated with a pleasant, human-like voice. In addition to simply reading text, it includes visually engaging elements like beautiful images and charts, highlighted keywords, and timelines, which are highly appealing to visual learners. Even a short preview video gave me a strong sense of its potential.

The feature is rolling out to all NotebookLM users in English-speaking regions first, with plans to expand language support and video styles in the future. You'll be able to easily create a video overview from the feature generation area on the right side of the screen, called the Studio panel. Furthermore, you'll be able to generate and save multiple types of output within the same notebook (e.g., audio summaries in different languages, video overviews tailored to specific roles, or mind maps and videos focused on each chapter), enabling flexible content creation and management customized to individual needs. This will even make it possible to understand information from multiple angles by using several learning tools simultaneously, such as listening to an audio summary while viewing a mind map.

How "Video Overview" Will Transform Learning and Work

I am confident that NotebookLM's Video Overview feature has the potential to fundamentally change how we learn and work. The process of organizing information and creating content, which once required significant time and effort, will be dramatically streamlined.

Consider the field of education. When teaching students about complex historical events or scientific concepts, static diagrams and text in a textbook often fail to spark imagination. But with Video Overview, abstract concepts like ancient trade routes or laws of physics can be clearly explained with narrated, moving diagrams and visual elements. This will be a huge help for students who are visual learners. For teachers, it will also reduce the burden of class preparation, freeing up more time for creative educational activities.

In the business world, the applications are vast. For example, preparing presentation materials for project updates or new product proposals can take a huge amount of time. With NotebookLM's Video Overview feature, you can simply feed it a project plan or past meeting minutes (sources) to automatically generate a presentation video summarizing the key points. This will significantly reduce the time spent on creating materials and allow you to focus on more substantive discussions. As someone who once felt like I was drowning in a sea of COBOL code, I would have surely shed a tear of joy for this feature.

Moreover, Video Overview will be a powerful tool for specialized research and report creation. For instance, from a dense document full of technical terms and complex concepts like the PMBOK® Guide – Seventh Edition, NotebookLM could extract key principles (e.g., focus on value, adapt to change) and performance domains (e.g., stakeholders, planning, uncertainty) and present them as a visually clear video overview. This will make it possible to grasp the big picture of a complex project more intuitively than ever before. For documents like corporate sustainability reports that heavily use charts, images, and graphs, it can extract key information and convey it effectively in video format, allowing recipients to understand the content more deeply.

Of course, there are limits to the amount of information NotebookLM can handle. According to Google's FAQ, it supports up to 100 notebooks, with each notebook containing a maximum of 50 sources (or 300 for the Pro plan) and each source being up to 500,000 words long. While these are generous limits, attempting to process extremely large files or transcripts of YouTube videos that are several hours long could lead to slow processing, missing information, or unexpected errors. Specifically, with PDFs that are rich in images and graphs, the AI's recognition accuracy can be inconsistent compared to text information. However, this is still an "experimental tool" in development, and we can look forward to its future evolution.

Now, I have a question for you, who has read this far. How effective do you think it would be to explain static documents with a video in your work or studies?

Looking to the Future, and What We Must Not Forget

The Video Overview feature in NotebookLM has the potential to bring about a major change in how we consume information. However, as an "experimental" tool, it still has some challenges, but also great potential beyond them.

Currently, there are limitations on the length of the generated videos. Based on Google's Veo 2 model, they are expected to be short segments of 10 to 20 seconds. It's also likely that they will be based on templates, similar to existing audio summaries, so further improvements will be needed to achieve highly personalized, creative visuals. Some users have even expressed a preference for longer-form podcasts over short videos. However, what's important is that this feature enables a layer of "lightweight visual storytelling" powered by AI.

Let's imagine the future. It's possible that in the future, it will support longer video generation, offer a wider selection of narrator voices, and even allow for more refined video styles. This could make it possible to, for example, extract information from multiple papers on a research topic—such as its historical background, key researchers, and future challenges—and automatically generate a video that feels like a documentary film. When combined with features like "Editor's Picks" for searching public notebooks and a "share public notebook" function, anyone could easily access high-quality educational content curated by experts in video format.

However, no matter how powerful an AI tool is, there's one thing we must not forget. The AI is merely our "assistant," and critical thinking and information verification should always be left to human hands. Information generated by AI should be treated as just one reference point, and it's crucial to not take it at face value but to cross-reference it with the original source. As a hobbyist AI programmer, I've learned firsthand the importance of always testing the code generated by an AI. To get the most out of AI, our wise judgment and skill in using it are essential.

I strongly believe this feature will provide us with a new way to not just "show" information, but to "deeply understand" it. The era of simply "reading" information may be over; the era of "experiencing" it may be upon us. This Video Overview feature is one of the keys that will unlock that door.

Summary: Opening a New Door to the Information Experience

In our learning and work so far, we have been surrounded by information composed of text and static images. However, Google NotebookLM's "Video Overview" feature brings a new dimension of motion and sound to this traditional information experience. It's as if the knowledge trapped within the pages of a book has come to life and is speaking to us.

The time is coming when explanatory videos and presentations that once required experts to spend a lot of time and effort to create can be instantly generated by AI using your own materials. This not only deepens our understanding of information but also has the potential to dramatically improve productivity in our learning and work.

It may take time and trial and error for this feature to fully mature. However, we are now witnessing the beginning of a major shift in how we interact with information. Why not ride this new wave of technology and evolve your information experience to the next level? I'm excited for a future where your vast knowledge comes to life and begins to speak.

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