NotebookLM is seeing a steady expansion of its capabilities, with recent developments focused on the Video Overview feature. The upcoming “custom style” option lets users define the visual character of generated videos, allowing prompts like “story-like quality” or “animated children’s storybook” to shape the output. This opens up new use cases for educators, marketers, and content creators seeking tailored video formats directly within NotebookLM, making the tool relevant for anyone needing to produce distinctive visual explanations or narratives.
This feature sits alongside existing video overview styles and is likely to be supported by Google’s Nano Banana model, which has already powered earlier video functions. With version 2 of Nano Banana reportedly on the horizon, potentially launching in the next week, the integration of these custom styles could coincide with or directly leverage the new model’s abilities. While there’s ongoing speculation about whether Nano Banana 2 will use Gemini 3 architecture, no official confirmation has surfaced.
The custom style capability would appear in the video overview generation menu inside NotebookLM, broadening creative control for users and strengthening the platform’s position as a flexible workspace for research and multimedia output. For Google, this move fits into a broader strategy of rapidly layering generative AI tools across its ecosystem, aiming to keep NotebookLM competitive as other AI-first note-taking and research assistants roll out similar features.
