Alternatives
Products that do what Oration (iOS) turns pdfs into audiobooks does
Hello HN community! I'm excited to introduce a project I've recently launched: Oration, an iOS app designed to convert PDFs into audiobooks. This idea was inspired by my experiences as an engineering student with ADHD, struggling to engage with dense academic papers. Relying on Text-to-Speech tools, despite their robotic quality, was a workaround for me and others with similar learning preferences or challenges, such as Dyslexia. Recognizing the limitations of existing tools—difficulty with complex formats, inability to skip over citations or footnotes, and inadequate handling of tables,…
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I'm launching something that started as a side project publicly today: ReadToMe, which is an iPhone app that turns paper books and other printed text into audio. Originally this was a Christmas present for my fiancée, who loves books but has an eye problem that makes it hard for her to read more than a few pages at a time. She mostly listens to audiobooks while following along with the paper book, but some books aren't available in audiobook or even e-book form, and all of the existing apps we tried were surprisingly bad at scanning paper books into audio — they make lots of mistakes,…
2024 · readtome-app.com
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Hey HN. I’m Ivan, hacker from Ukraine. For about a year, I was working on Listenly — an app to listen to text content with OpenAI's natural-sounding text-to-speech model. At some moment, I realized that it would be cool to take all the public domain e-books and create audio versions for them. So I did it... kind-of. It would cost an immense amount of money to generate all the audio right away (OpenAI TTS costs approximately $0.84/hour of audio; 11labs, for comparison, is 10 times more expensive). So, I took a more gradual approach. I took all the metadata from the Project Gutenberg…
2024 · listenly.io
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Hello HN, this has been my personal project for quite some time now. It has been a slowly evolving project over the years and its core function is for users to expose themselves to progressively more difficult lessons of music notes. NOTE: It is free and there are no ads. There is an in app purchase but most of the app doesn't require it.
2025 · apps.apple.com
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Hey friends! Brad here - long time HN user, founder, engineer (Coinbase, Soothe, Jeevz, Release, Hired, GrowthX, etc)... I have been struggling recently with too many tabs, emails, articles, etc sitting unread while I swap between Claude code sessions all day. So I decided to build Orate to help me work through the backlog by listening to it all like I would a podcast. Orate allows you to select any text on your screen and keyboard shortcut it to a listening queue where it gets processed using the latest + greatest TTS AI models, and then read back to you in a mostly-natural sounding voice.…
Jul 2026 · orate.to
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Hey HN, cofounder of Readwise here. We've been working on this cross-platform reader app for about 2 years, excited to finally share it in public beta. Probably the most notable thing that makes Reader unique is that it supports almost any content type you could want to save/read/highlight: * web pages * emails/newsletters * PDFs * ePubs * twitter threads * youtube videos (with transcripts) * RSS feeds With all of your knowledge content in one place, we built powerful reading and highlighting, as well as a bunch of novel triage/organization features, so you can actually…
2022 · readwise.io
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Hi HN! I'm stoked to share a project I've been working on called PDF to Podcast. It's a free, open-source tool that automatically converts PDF documents into engaging, informative podcast-style audio content using large language models and text-to-speech tech. Inspiration: The idea for this project came from the NotebookLM demo at Google I/O, where they showcased generating audio dialogue from uploaded PDFs and other sources. However, that audio feature hasn't been publicly released yet, and I wanted to challenge myself to build something similar using existing tools and APIs. How it…
2024 · pdf-to-podcast.com
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Here is a tool I built initially for myself to help with my German and Greek language studies. It started as a hack for creating Anki cards from native language audio. It extracts the words, finds their base forms (lemmas) and groups the examples by the lemma. At some point I realised that I have a transcription with word level timestamps that opens a lot of other opportunities. So I added a mode to click the first and last word in the transcript and it starts looping with the right gap and repeat count. Another feature I use a lot is selecting an audio fragment, sending a predefined prompt…
Jun 2026 · lingochunk.com
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Hi HN! I've been working on BookWith, an open-source e-book reader that integrates AI as your reading companion. The problem: Traditional e-readers are passive. When you encounter something unclear, you have to context-switch to search for it. Your highlights and notes remain isolated, and you can't easily connect ideas across different books. My solution: BookWith embeds an AI that maintains full context of what you're reading. It features: - Context-aware AI chat: Ask questions about the current page/chapter and get instant answers - AI podcast generation: Automatically converts book…
2025 · github.com
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2022 · article.audio
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