Meta goes to war with Google with its podcast production artificial intelligence

Google’s NotebookLM artificial intelligence tool has recently attracted a lot of attention from users; You can give your text files to this artificial intelligence to produce a podcast with its contents. Now Meta has unveiled NotebookLlama, which does almost the same thing but is open source.

NotebookLlama first makes a copy of your file, which could be a news article, TechCrunch reports. It then dramatizes that transcript, meaning, for example, that it inserts pauses in the text to make the final output sound more like a podcast. It then feeds the dramatized transcript version to text-to-speech models. You can see this process in the image below:

Meta artificial intelligence to compete with Google

What Meta AI does is similar to Google’s NotebookLM, but it doesn’t seem to have the same quality. In the examples published by NotebookLlama, we can see that the voices are robotic and sometimes the sentences are not understandable. Meta researchers say the quality of podcasts could be improved with more robust models. In this project, Meta uses its own Llama models for processing.

Meta on the GitHub page of the NotebookLlama model says that one possible approach to creating a podcast is to use 2 models to discuss a common topic and write the outline of the podcast together. Of course, currently in this artificial intelligence, a single model is used to write the outline of the podcast.

Overall, NotebookLlama isn’t the first AI to attempt to emulate NotebookLM. Previously, some projects are more successful than competitors, but none of them – even NotebookLM itself – have been able to solve the problem of artificial intelligence illusion; That is, the podcasts produced by artificial intelligence sometimes contain fake information.