Alternatives
Products that do what eBook to audiobook narration with realistic AI voices does
For a while I've wanted to try out the new AI voices for long-form narration, but everything I found required a subscription that didn't justify my limited usage. I came across the open Kokoro model [0] and the voices are very good -- good enough to listen to for hours without the fatigue I got from legacy, robotic TTS voices. The model is 82m parameters and designed to run fast, but I still struggled to get reasonable times from CPU inference on my 12-core laptop. I thought a cloud-based GPU service would let me generate audiobooks fast enough to feed my own self-hosted library, and that…
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Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly. I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI…
2025 · github.com
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Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653752
Apr 2026 · github.com
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Our goal with this project is to build a completely open source, state of the art turn detection model that can be used in any voice AI application. I've been experimenting with LLM voice conversations since GPT-4 was first released. (There's a previous front page Show HN about Pipecat, the open source voice AI orchestration framework I work on. [1]) It's been almost two years, and for most of that time, I've been expecting that someone would "solve" turn detection. We all built initial, pretty good 80/20 versions of turn detection on top of VAD (voice activity detection) models. And…
2025 · github.com
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Hi Hacker News, This is definitely out of my comfort zone. I just wanted to show you guys because I'm super proud of it. It's a 100% faithful recreation based off of the schematics, patents, and ROMs that were found online. So please watch the video and tell me what you think https://youtu.be/auOlZXI1VxA The reason why I think this is relevant is because I've been a programmer for 25 years and AI scares the shit out of me. I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for…
Jan 2026
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Hey everyone! I've been working on a 'program"' (read as: overengineered bash script) It's called AI-Audiobook-Maker, and it was born out of my experiences with my 10-year-old cousin who is developmentally disabled. Despite his difficulties with reading, his enthusiasm for stories goes hard, even if he can't READ them. Watching him, I realized that the world of books was kinda out of reach for him, and I suppose many others. So, I set out to build something that could bridge this gap. After only finding shitty, expensive subscription sites that only gave you a couple hours of audio gen, I…
2023 · github.com
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Hey there HN! I believe the future of AI communication will be more voice and less text. Low-latency realistic voice interactions are finally becoming feasible. I've built a few voice-first apps on Retell AI using Elevenlabs voices. This one uses Claude Haiku for responses and Mixtral to switch between posts and comments. The AI knows about the top 30 posts and their comments on Hacker News right now. After a Google sign-in you can try it free for 10 minutes. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
2024 · callhackernews.com
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I had a bunch of ebooks with no audiobook version available. So I built an iOS app that converts EPUB files into audiobooks using text-to-speech. Two voice options: - Free on-device voices (processed locally, no server needed) - Natural cloud voices (one-time purchase per book, no subscription) Cloud conversion runs chunk by chunk. You can start listening other chapters generate in the background. Once done, the audiobook lives on your device. No account required. No subscription. You import your own EPUBs and either use device TTS for free or pay per book for the cloud voices. Nothing…
Feb 2026 · apps.apple.com
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Hey HN! I've been working on a side project to create an audio transcription API based on the OpenAI whisper model. Sign up link: https://whisperapi.com I tried to make the API really easy to use and get setup with. Also, because the Whisper model is so good, turns out I can offer the service for about 75% cheaper than what seems like the industry average. I'm always looking to make improvements, so would appreciate any feedback anyone has!
2022 · whisperapi.com
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Turn any EPUB into an audiobook with AI voices in iOS
Jun 2026 · apps.apple.com
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The audio/TTS space just moved fast. In the last week alone: NVIDIA – PersonaPlex-7B Open-source, full-duplex conversational speech model. Inworld AI – TTS-1.5 Realtime TTS (<250ms), $0.005/min, currently #1 on Artificial Analysis. Flash Labs – Chroma 1.0 First open-source, end-to-end, real-time speech-to-speech model. Alibaba Qwen – Qwen3-TTS Fully open-sourced TTS family: Base, CustomVoice, VoiceDesign. Kyutai Labs – Pocket TTS Runs locally on a laptop. No GPU required. Feels like TTS is hitting the same acceleration moment LLMs had last year. Realtime, open-source, and local is…
Jan 2026 · github.com
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