NotebookLM’s new Mind Maps could help you learn more efficiently

By Willow Roberts Published March 20, 2025

Google video of NotebookLM mind map feature. — Google

NotebookLM users have a few new features to play around with starting this week, including a visual summary feature dubbed “Mind Map.”

For anyone who isn’t familiar with NotebookLM, it’s an AI tool from Google designed specifically for summarizing, searching, and analyzing libraries of information. The idea is that you provide it with a selection of documents and files, and it will help you interact with them using natural language.

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It’s particularly useful for students and researchers who are reading lots of essays and papers, allowing them to find quotes and keep track of where they read certain information. Another popular NotebookLM feature, Audio Overviews, has just been added to Gemini too, letting users everywhere generate summaries in the style of a podcast.

Getting back to the new Mind Map feature, it organizes the information in your notebooks according to topic and displays it in an interactive mind map. This can help you navigate to information on a certain topic quickly, as well as find new connections between it and other copies.

🛳️Rolling out interactive Mindmaps in NotebookLM!

I'm so inspired by the Exploratorium here in SF – What if every notebook generated your own personal set of interactive understanding toys that help you learn through play? What if instead of text or images, Notebook could even… pic.twitter.com/fFJCGrv0kc

— Simon (@tokumin) March 19, 2025

You might be able to see which of your sources agree with each other and which don’t, as well as which topics and arguments are being covered the most. This might not sound exciting to everyone but if you’ve ever written research papers or essays — this sounds like a dream. The maps can also be downloaded and shared as images.

And for the multilingual folks out there, you can now generate content in languages other than English. This means you can upload sources in whatever language you want and have NotebookLM generate content about them in whatever language you want.

For now, this feature is text-based only, but hopefully Google is working on expanding the output languages available for Audio Overviews too. The new features will roll out over the next week and they’re available to both paid and free users.

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Computing Writer

Willow Roberts has been a Computing Writer at Digital Trends for a year and has been writing for about a decade. She has a…

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