NotebookLM vs MyLens AI: AI Research & Visual Thinking Comparison

When it comes to making sense of your content, AI platforms generally take one of two approaches: some are built around text—helping you search, ask questions, and get written answers from your documents, while others are built around visuals—turning your information into interactive diagrams and charts so you can see the big picture at a glance. NotebookLM and MyLens represent these two directions—both powerful, but designed around fundamentally different ways of understanding and sharing knowledge.

If you're deciding between them, you're likely weighing whether you need deep document interrogation with citations, or whether you need to visualize your raw content and explore finding insights by seeing them visually. MyLens is a tool where you can visualize your content and discover insights through visual exploration. This comprehensive guide breaks down what each platform offers, how they differ, and when each one shines.

TL;DR

NotebookLM is a text-based research assistant—upload documents, ask questions, get cited answers and exportable content like slides and podcasts. MyLens AI is a visual thinking platform—upload sources, get interactive diagrams you can click to expand, drill down, and explore. Choose NotebookLM for deep document Q&A; choose MyLens for turning information into visuals you can understand, refine, and present.

What Is NotebookLM?

NotebookLM is Google's AI-powered research partner, built with the latest Gemini models. You upload sources—PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, Google Docs, audio files, and more—into a notebook, and it becomes a personalized AI expert grounded in your information. The key differentiator: every response includes citations showing exactly where the information came from in your sources.

NotebookLM excels at document-based reasoning, multi-document synthesis, and source-grounded Q&A. It's designed for people who need to interrogate a collection of materials and get precise, attributable answers. The platform recently added powerful visualization capabilities including slide decks, infographics, video overviews, and audio podcasts—but these are export formats, not interactive visual structures you can explore and edit.

Key NotebookLM Features

• Source-grounded Q&A with citations to original documents
• Fast Research and Deep Research for discovering relevant sources
• Audio Overviews: Generate engaging podcast-style discussions
• Slide Decks: Create presentation-ready slides from your sources
• Video Summaries: AI-narrated video overviews in various lengths
• Infographics: Visual summaries in landscape, portrait, or square formats
• Text Reports: Comprehensive detailed reports
• Flashcards and Quizzes: Learning tools for studying
• Collaboration: Share notebooks with viewers or editors
• Multi-format input: PDFs, websites, YouTube, Google Drive files, audio, images

Free accounts offer generous limits for notebooks and sources. Pro accounts provide expanded capacity and more multimedia generation options. Check NotebookLM's website for current pricing and limits.

What Is MyLens?

MyLens is an AI visual thinking platform that transforms your sources and data into interactive visuals and diagrams. Instead of reading through everything line by line, you can see the structure visually and explore insights by interacting with the visual. The visuals are rich, interactive structures where you can ask AI to expand nodes, drill down into sections, get citations from sources, generate infographics of any parts, and even get visual explanations. You explore interactively, adding more information to visual nodes until you fully grasp all insights. The result is a professional, beautiful visual you can share or present.

MyLens supports a wide range of inputs: PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint files, URLs, YouTube videos, spreadsheets (CSV, Excel), images (including screenshots), and plain text. You can feed it meeting notes, reports, articles, or any content and ask for a timeline, mind map, quadrant, flowchart, table, or other visual format. The AI suggests the best visual type for your content and generates it automatically. Give it a try right here:

Key MyLens Features

• Interactive Visuals: Mind maps, timelines, flowcharts, quadrants, tables, trees, and more
• Click to Explore: Expand nodes, drill down, get explanations, view citations
• Fully Editable: Manually adjust content or ask AI to refine visuals
• Multi-format Input: Documents, images, spreadsheets, web content, videos, text
• Chrome Extension: Wherever you’re on the web—YouTube, websites, docs—click MyLens to visualize content
• Multi-language Support: Generate visuals in any language
• Presentation-ready: Compelling visuals that are engaging to present or post
• Citation Support: View source evidence when files are uploaded

MyLens is valuable for professionals analyzing business files, students turning study materials into visual summaries, educators creating lesson plans, and content creators organizing information for presentations.

Feature Comparison: NotebookLM vs MyLens AI

When to Choose NotebookLM

Choose NotebookLM when your primary need is research, learning, or content creation from documents. It excels at source-grounded Q&A with citations, generating exportable content like slide decks and video summaries, and helping you interrogate multiple documents to find connections and precise answers.

• Getting explanations of complex concepts with citations you can trace back to sources
• Asking abstract questions across multiple documents and finding connections between topics
• Creating slide decks, video summaries, and podcast-style audio discussions from your sources
• Generating comprehensive reports, flashcards, and quizzes for learning and reference
• Searching for specific moments, themes, or comparing information across documents with precision

If your workflow is "upload sources, ask questions, get cited answers, create exportable content," NotebookLM is a strong fit.

When to Choose MyLens

Choose MyLens when you have scattered raw data—documents, notes, reports, or other content—and need to quickly turn it into professional visuals and diagrams. It excels at generating all types of interactive visuals together—timelines, mind maps, flowcharts, tables, and more—that highlight key points. You can explore interactively by expanding nodes, drilling down, getting explanations, and adding information to build understanding. MyLens makes it super easy to present or share these engaging visualizations with your team or audience in different formats.

• Quickly transforming scattered sources (docs, data, videos, etc) into professional visuals that highlight key points and relationships
• Understanding complex information at a glance through visual structures like timelines, mind maps, flowcharts, and tables
• Exploring interactively by clicking nodes to expand, drill down, get explanations, view citations, or generate infographics
• Discovering insights you might have missed and adding more information to visual nodes as you explore deeper
• Editing and personalizing visuals to make them yours, then present or share with your team or audience in different formats

If your workflow involves scattered data that needs to become structured visuals you can explore, understand, refine, and easily present or share with others, MyLens is built for that.

Key Differences: Visual Output vs Visual Thinking

The fundamental difference between NotebookLM and MyLens lies in how they handle visualization:

NotebookLM: Export-Based Visualization

NotebookLM creates visual outputs (slide decks, infographics, videos) as export formats. Once generated, these are static files you can download and share. You can't interact with them, expand sections, or drill down—they're finished products. This is perfect when you need a polished deliverable for presentation or sharing.

MyLens: Interactive Visual Structures

MyLens creates all types of interactive visual structures together—mind maps, timelines, flowcharts, tables, and more—that you can explore, edit, and refine. The visuals are living diagrams that grow and adapt as you interact with them. Click any part to expand, drill down, get explanations, or view citations. MyLens makes it super easy to present or share these visuals with others, making it perfect when you need to think through information, explore relationships, build understanding iteratively, and communicate your insights effectively.

Pricing & Accessibility

Both NotebookLM and MyLens offer free versions to try. For more sources, usage, and advanced features, both platforms have paid plans available. Check NotebookLM and MyLens pricing for current plan details.