First look at Video Overviews in Google's NotebookLM

Google continues to build out NotebookLM, which has already established itself as a tool for researchers, students, and knowledge workers to organize information and generate summaries from their uploaded content. Audio overviews, summarized readings of notes, have been present in the product for some time, providing a hands-free way to absorb material. At Google I/O, the company announced an upcoming feature: video overviews, promising to automatically create short, narrated video summaries of NotebookLM content. Despite the initial reveal more than two months ago, these video overviews remain unavailable to the public.

In July, Google released Shared Notebooks, a new addition that lets users browse curated, pre-made notebooks, chat with the underlying resources, and access pre-generated audio overviews.

Recent findings by TestingCatalog reveal that Google has already generated some video overview files within the Shared Notebooks environment. Specifically, video overviews exist for at least two topics: "Yellowstone Park" and "Human Ageing". These files are not accessible to regular users and require internal permissions to view.

The videos themselves follow a consistent format: a sequence of slides with text, diagrams, and static images on a white background, accompanied by a voiceover, but with no animation or dynamic motion. Each video carries a NotebookLM watermark and basic playback controls for navigation and sharing.

While the Sparkify project inside Google Labs focuses on emotive, character-driven video explainers, NotebookLM’s video artifacts are much more factual and slide-based, targeting those who benefit from direct, structured learning: students, researchers, and educators. These findings indicate that Google’s technical work on video overviews is likely complete, and the company may be waiting for the optimal moment to launch, possibly in response to competitor moves or educational cycles.

NotebookLM’s current direction emphasizes accessible, factual learning tools, distinguishing it from more animated or entertainment-oriented approaches. The process behind these discoveries also underscores the role of independent analysis in surfacing features ahead of official announcements, with reverse engineering offering a glimpse of what’s to come before wider release.