Meta releases an ‘open’ version of Google’s podcast generator

23/05/2025

Meta releases an ‘open’ version of Google’s podcast generator | TechCrunch

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Meta releases an ‘open’ version of Google’s podcast generator | TechCrunch

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Meta releases an ‘open’ version of Google’s podcast generator
=============================================================

[Kyle Wiggers](https://techcrunch.com/author/kyle-wiggers/)

10:20 AM PDT · October 27, 2024

Meta has released an “open” implementation of the [viral generate-a-podcast feature](https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/17/googles-notebooklm-now-lets-you-guide-ai-generated-audio-conversations-launches-business-pilot/) in Google’s NotebookLM.

Called [NotebookLlama](https://github.com/meta-llama/llama-recipes/tree/main/recipes/quickstart/NotebookLlama), the project uses Meta’s own [Llama](https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/08/meta-llama-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-open-generative-ai-model/) models for much of the processing, unsurprisingly. Like NotebookLM, it can generate back-and-forth, podcast-style digests of text files uploaded to it.

NotebookLlama first creates a transcript from a file — for example, a PDF of a news article or blog post. Then it adds “more dramatization” and interruptions before feeding the transcript to open text-to-speech models.

![Image 6: Meta NotebookLlama](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Outline.jpg?w=680)

**Image Credits:**Meta

The results don’t sound nearly as good as NotebookLM. In the NotebookLlama [samples](https://x.com/reach_vb/status/1850522281681813862) I’ve listened to, the voices have a very obvious robotic quality to them and tend to talk over each other at odd points.

But the Meta researchers behind the project say that the quality could be improved with stronger models.

“The [text-to-speech] model is the limitation of how natural this will sound,” they wrote on NotebookLlama’s GitHub page. “[Also,] another approach of writing the podcast would be having two agents debate the topic of interest and write the podcast outline. Right now we use a single model to write the podcast outline.”

NotebookLlama isn’t the first [attempt](https://itsfoss.com/open-notebooklm/) to replicate NotebookLM’s podcast feature. Some projects have had more success than others. But none — not even NotebookLM itself — have managed to solve the [hallucination problem](https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/04/are-language-models-doomed-to-always-hallucinate/) that dogs all AI. That is, AI-generated podcasts are [bound to contain some made-up stuff](https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1fqwkaz/are_there_hallucinations_in_the_generated_audio/).

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Kyle Wiggers

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Kyle Wiggers is TechCrunch’s AI Editor. His writing has appeared in VentureBeat and Digital Trends, as well as a range of gadget blogs including Android Police, Android Authority, Droid-Life, and XDA-Developers. He lives in Manhattan with his partner, a music therapist.

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Meta releases an ‘open’ version of Google’s podcast generator

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