Are your best ideas stuck in a notebook, or are your whiteboard photos from meetings just gathering digital dust in your camera roll? For years, the biggest gap in digital research has been the disconnect between our physical notes and our digital tools. We take photos of important diagrams or jot down brilliant ideas by hand, but that information remains “dead” data—unsearchable and impossible to organize without hours of manual typing.
That changes today with the massive new NotebookLM OCR update. Google has officially given its AI research assistant “eyes,” allowing you to upload handwritten notes, screenshots, and complex diagrams directly into your workspace. By using advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR), NotebookLM doesn’t just “see” your images; it reads them, understands the context, and turns them into fully searchable sources. In this post, I break down exactly how to use this new feature to digitize your workflow and stop manual typing forever.
- Key Takeaways
- The “OCR Superpower”: You can now upload physical photos (handwriting, textbook pages) and screenshots directly into NotebookLM, where the AI instantly extracts all text and meaning.
- Query Your Images: Unlike basic scanning apps, you can have a conversation with your images. Ask questions like “Summarize the key points from this meeting” or “Explain this graph,” and the AI will analyze the visual data to give you an answer.
- Unified Research: The true power lies in the mix. You can combine your new image uploads with standard PDFs, Google Docs, and web URLs in a single notebook, allowing the AI to connect dots between your handwritten thoughts and your formal research.
- Deep Research Integration: The update works seamlessly with NotebookLM’s “Deep Research” agents, meaning the AI can read your handwritten note and then go out to the web to find supporting studies or data to back it up.
Ready to see this workflow in action and start digitizing your notes? Watch the full video below to see the step-by-step breakdown of the new OCR feature!
P.S. If you want to go deeper than just tutorials and actually build a business with AI tools then join the AI Profit Boardroom. Here’s where you will find tons of tutorials, tips, tools and advanced workflows that don’t make it to YouTube. JOIN HERE