It's been quite the month for Google's AI-powered research assistant, NotebookLM. The team has been dropping update after update. If you haven't been actively keeping up, Google finally began rolling out the much-awaited Video Overviews a couple of days ago. Though the feature is only now starting to appear on most people's accounts, I luckily got access to it last weekend and talked about three ways I'm already using it in a separate article.

Along with that update, NotebookLM's Studio panel also got a neat refresh, adding the ability to generate multiple Audio Overviews. This means you can create separate Audio Overviews in different languages and with different custom prompts!

After all the chaos surrounding this massive update finally settled, the team announced via an X post that users can now upload multiple URLs as sources simultaneously. While using NotebookLM today, I spotted yet another feature they quietly added.

You can now choose the emoji that appears on your NotebookLM notebooks

Today, when I created a new notebook in NotebookLM and added all my sources, a little NEW: Pick your own emoji! text appeared right next to where the cover emoji shows up. I managed to capture a screenshot of it quickly, which I've attached below too.

If you aren't familiar with how the cover emoji works, the emoji that appears right next to your notebook's title is automatically generated based on the content of the documents and sources uploaded to your notebook. In my experience, the emoji is based on the content of the very first source you upload to your notebook.

Typically, all the sources in my NotebookLM notebook tend to be focused on the same topic, so my cover emoji usually fits well. But now, with the new option to pick your own emoji, you can override the automatic choice and make your notebook cover feel a bit more personalized. I already know this feature will be extremely helpful for me. I tend to have different notebooks that are sort of related to each other, and they all tend to have the same emoji.

For instance, the notebook I created for my programming course and another I made to learn Swift have the same emoji, which can get confusing when I’m quickly scanning through them. Being able to customize the emoji means I can now easily tell my notebooks apart at a glance. All you need to do is click the emoji that's automatically set, and the emoji picker will open, letting you choose from hundreds of options to find the perfect one for your notebook.

Though NotebookLM tends to announce such small features on X and Discord, they've been pretty quiet about this one. So, I'm not sure when exactly the feature rolled out (though I'm sure I only got access to it a couple of minutes before I started writing this).

I have reached out to Google to get more details on the rollout. Since it’s the weekend, I’m not sure when I’ll hear back, but I’ll update the article once I do. Nonetheless, I’m glad to see NotebookLM quietly adding these thoughtful little touches and finally making notebooks more customizable.