NotebookLM’s New Infographics Feature Is Great for Visual Learners
Another day, another update to Google’s NotebookLM, the versatile AI tool that works like a personal assistant focused solely on you and your needs. The latest update is aimed at visual learners: you can turn your source documents into useful infographics that give you a clear picture, literally, of what PDFs, websites, videos, or other documents you’re studying or organizing are about.
How to use the new NotebookLM infographics feature
To use the new feature, open one of your NotebookLM notebooks (the name given to folders full of specific documents you’ve uploaded) and navigate to the panel on the right side. This is the same panel where you find the other offerings like video maker and flashcard maker.
As with these tools, you simply press the associated button to generate the corresponding product, making sure that the sources in your left panel that you want to include are all checked. I tried it this morning, first using the NotebookLM account associated with my personal Chrome profile and what I study in my private life, and then using the one I set up for work, which contains a test notebook full of materials on how to study for the SAT. (I’m strict about using different Chrome profiles for different parts of my life and now have up to seven.)
In my personal account, the button was titled BETA– and he acted like that. After two failed attempts, NotebookLM was unable to produce an infographic based on my documents. In my business account, however, the beta label was missing and it served the function just fine, spitting out this:
Credit: Google
This rolls out with full functionality to accounts at different times, obviously, but I was happy to see one of mine had easy access because I thought the infographic was solid.
What do you think of it so far?
Who is the infographic feature useful for?
I don’t consider myself a visual learner and mainly use NotebookLM to refine my ideas or generate educational audio clips that I can listen to while I clean the house, so I didn’t expect to like it. I don’t like the mind map maker in NotebookLM at all, for example; Flowcharts just aren’t the best way to learn, and that’s okay.
But the infographic was concise, engaging, and just detailed enough to keep me interested and looking at it. I’m unlikely to use this to study or refine my work often, but I can absolutely see how it would be useful to someone who is a more visual learner, especially if all the lines and boxes on a mind map can become too complicated to be useful.
