NotebookLM Offers a New Feature for Visual Learners
Another day, another update to Google’s NotebookLM , a versatile AI-powered tool that acts like a personal assistant, focused solely on you and your needs. The latest update is designed for visual learners: you can transform your source material into useful infographics that give you a clear overview—literally—of the content of PDFs, websites, videos, or other materials you’re studying or organizing.
How to use NotebookLM’s new infographics feature
To use the new feature, open any of your NotebookLM notebooks (the folders containing your uploaded content) and go to the panel on the right. This panel also contains other features, such as the video and flashcard creator .
As with these tools, you simply click the appropriate button to create the corresponding product, making sure all the sources you want to include in the left panel are checked. I tried this out this morning, first using the NotebookLM account associated with my personal Chrome profile and the things I study in my daily life, and then using the one I set up for work, which contains a test-taker notebook full of SAT prep materials. (I’m a strict adherent to the principle of using different Chrome profiles for different areas of my life, and I now have seven of them.)
On my personal account, the button was labeled “BETA” —and it worked accordingly. After two unsuccessful attempts, NotebookLM failed to create an infographic based on my content. However, on my work account, the “beta” label was missing, and the app successfully completed its task, producing the following:
Of course, full functionality will be rolled out to different accounts at different times, but I was happy to see that one of my accounts had easy access because I thought the infographics were reliable.
Who will benefit from the infographic feature?
I don’t consider myself a visual learner and use NotebookLM mainly to refine ideas or create educational audio clips to listen to while cleaning the house, so I didn’t expect to like it. For example, I don’t like the mind map builder in NotebookLM at all; flowcharts aren’t the best way to learn, and that’s okay.
But the infographic was concise, engaging, and detailed enough to hold my interest and keep me reading. I’m unlikely to use it often for studying or improving my work, but I can certainly see how useful it would be for those who prefer visual perception, especially considering that all the lines and squares of a mind map might be too confusing to be useful.