If you’ve ever wished a dense report could turn itself into a short explainer you could watch on the commute, Google just did most of the work for you. NotebookLM’s Video Overview — the feature that stitches your notes and source documents into a chaptered, narrated video — is rolling out to Android and iOS, putting AI-generated explainers in your pocket.
What changed on mobile
Open the Studio tab in the NotebookLM app (look for the magic-wand Studio button) and you’ll now see an option to generate a Video Overview. The mobile app also syncs with the web: videos you made on a laptop appear on your phone, and playback includes speed controls so you can skim or slow down as needed.
Alongside video, Google improved the Infographics experience on mobile. Tap the new pencil icon to edit layout and behavior: choose Landscape, Portrait or Square; pick which Sources the graphic should draw from; set the output Language; and add a custom Prompt to steer tone or focus. Those simple controls make it easier to create quick visuals without hopping back to a desktop.
There are hints in release notes that richer Slide Deck customization is coming — options like Detailed versus Presenter formats, length controls, and language settings — but those controls don’t appear to be widely available on phones yet.
How the videos are made (in plain terms)
NotebookLM taps Google’s Gemini family of models to analyze the documents you add to a notebook — PDFs, Google Docs, web pages, class notes — then extracts themes, sequences them into a narrative and renders visuals and voiceover. The result is a short, sourced video essay that calls out key arguments and points readers back to the original material.
That grounding in sources is a selling point: NotebookLM typically includes citations, so the videos aren’t just catchy summaries but maps back to the documents you relied on. If your workflow already lives in Google Workspace, this is another tidy way to repurpose existing files.
What it’s good for — and where to be cautious
Students and busy professionals stand to gain the most. Instead of carving out an hour to read a 40‑page whitepaper, you can watch a structured overview and then dive into the most relevant sections. Consulting teams, legal researchers and instructors experimenting with flipped‑classroom materials will likely test these shortcuts first.
But it’s not magic. Generated videos can smooth over nuance, and very technical content — dense math, specialist notation or high‑precision scientific arguments — still trips up automated summaries. Users should treat Video Overviews as a time‑saving scaffold, not a final deliverable for high‑stakes work.
Also note a feature gap: on mobile you can’t yet pick extravagant visual styles (the anime or comic filters you might see on the web are still web‑only). Creative controls remain more advanced on desktop for now.
Why enterprises care — and why some are cautious
Transforming documents into ready‑to‑share videos shortens the path from research to presentation, which appeals to consultancies and internal comms teams trying to shave hours off slide production. Google’s NotebookLM sits inside a broader Gemini push — connect-the-dots features that also touch Gmail, Drive and Docs — so this capability fits a larger productivity story. For context on Gemini’s expanding role inside Workspace, see how Gemini Deep Research is being tied into Gmail and Drive.
That said, regulated industries remain careful. Firms handling sensitive financial or health data typically restrict use until they’re confident about residency, access controls and training‑data policies. Google stresses NotebookLM’s enterprise privacy posture, but security teams will perform their own checks before allowing it near regulated content.
A small change that nudges a bigger habit
Putting video generation on phones nudges learning and knowledge work toward a more multimodal norm: short videos, bite‑sized infographics and AI‑assisted briefs become the first pass, with humans adding verification and polish. It’s part of a larger tilt in Google’s product strategy toward integrating agentic and generative features across its apps — another recent example of that trend is Google’s experiment with AI Mode for booking and tasks, which signals broader ambitions for practical assistants inside everyday apps (/news/google-ai-mode-booking-agentic).
If you want the new features now, update the NotebookLM app on your phone and sign in. The rollout appears broad but staggered; if the Studio options aren’t visible, try force‑stopping the app or waiting a bit — Google’s server‑side switches often arrive over several days.
This update doesn’t rewrite how professionals verify facts or craft brand‑aligned visuals, but it does make the first draft of understanding a lot faster — and that’s the kind of little efficiency that changes how people start their work.