Meta Launches NotebookLlama, an AI-Powered Podcast Creator
Meta has released an “open” app called NotebookLlama to create AI podcasts similar to Google’s NotebookLM .
Unsurprisingly, the project, called CuadernoLlama, uses Meta’s Llama models for most of its processing. Like NotebookLM, it can generate podcast-style summaries of text files loaded into it.
NotebookLlama first generates text from a file, such as a PDF of a news article or blog post. It then adds “more dramatization” and interruptions before inserting the transcription into open text-to-speech models.
The results don't sound as good as Google's NotebookLM. In the NotebookLM samples, the voices were heard to have a very distinct robotic quality and tended to speak over each other at odd points.
But the Meta researchers behind the project say the quality could be improved with more powerful models.
“The text-to-speech model is the limitation on how clear the audio is,” they write on NotebookLlama’s GitHub page. “[Also,] another way to write a podcast is to have two agents discuss the topic of interest and write the podcast outline. Now we use one model to write the podcast outline.”
NotebookLlama isn’t the first attempt to clone Google’s NotebookLM podcast service . Some projects have been more successful than others. But none of them, not even NotebookLM itself, have been able to solve the hallucination problem that plagues AI as a whole. Which means that AI-generated podcasts are bound to have some things going on.
To register for Meta's NotebookLlama to try it out before anyone else, head to this link and enter your email so that you will receive a notification as soon as it is launched.