My own infographics and slides for the Book of Tea

I am so fascinated by Google’s NotebookLM that I build my own slide and infographic generator. I used Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea as an example and generated infographics and slides with Gemini and OpenAI.

The Source Material

Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea (1906) is a short essay that uses the Japanese tea ceremony as a lens into Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and aesthetics. It’s a surprisingly good test case for AI-generated visuals. The content spans philosophy, history, architecture, art appreciation, and cross-cultural comparison between East and West. That range forces the AI to make real editorial choices about what to emphasize and how to visualize abstract concepts.

Three Tools, Three Approaches

I compared outputs from Google NotebookLM with the graphics generated by my own tool using Gemini Nano Banana Pro gemini-3-pro-image-preview and OpenAI’s gpt-image-1.5 with low fidelity.

Here is the generated infographic from NotebookLM on the left and from my tool with Gemini on the right:

NotebookLM

My tool + Gemini

The full comparison is in the original article: The Book of Tea: Comparing AI-Generated Slides and Infographics