No repeats please

Is it ok that in this challenge you treat ‘aba’ and ‘aba’ as two different strings? It just doesn’t make sense to me. Following that logic I can say that there is no repeating consecutive letters in ‘aab’.

Return the number of total permutations of the provided string that don’t have repeated consecutive letters. Assume that all characters in the provided string are each unique.

There can be consecutive letters in ‘aab’ but the consecutive letters are not from the same index in the string.One ‘a’ is index 0 and the other one is index 1.