Parent Facebook Meta published a AI tool who can create a PDF to podcast workflow, which means it can turn PDFs into podcasts with this easy-to-follow guide. This ability, called NotebookLlamais similar to GoogleIt is CarnetLM.
However, there is a big difference: NotebookLlama is “a Open source version of NotebookLM”, which means that any developer can access, modify and distribute the source code and associated documents.

How NotebookLlama works

NotebookLlama is an AI-powered tool that can turn a PDF document, like a news article or blog post, into a podcast-style script. According to the explanation on the tool’s github page, it transforms raw content by first creating a verbatim transcript of the PDF, then adding things like pauses and dramatic interruptions to make it seem more like a conversation natural. This improved script is then integrated speech synthesis templates to generate the final audio output.
Meta-researchers claim that the current quality of the generated podcast is highly dependent on the capabilities of text-to-speech models and believe that the use of more advanced models can significantly improve the naturalness and expressiveness of the generated speech.
“The text-to-speech model is the limitation on how natural this can sound,” NotebookLlama’s GitHub page says.
Furthermore, they suggest that an even more engaging podcast could be created using two AI agents to “debate” the topic and generate a more dynamic and interactive script.
“…another approach to writing the podcast would be to have two agents debate the topic of interest and write the outline for the podcast. Currently, we use one template to write the outline of the podcast,” he adds.
Google’s NotebookLM also allows users to upload PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs or Google Slides and summarize them to “make interesting connections between topics, all powered by comprehension skills multimodal Gemini 1.5”.