eBook to audiobook narration with realistic AI voices
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…
eBook to audiobook narration with realistic AI voices launched on June 24, 2026 with 8 votes, #1,599 of 22,647 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Privacy-first ebook to audiobook conversion. Upload your DRM-free ebook, choose a voice, and download your M4B audiobook. The service has been custom tailored for quality text extraction and speech synthesis.
Privacy-first ebook to audiobook conversion. Upload your DRM-free ebook, choose a voice, and download your M4B audiobook.
Upload an ebook, pick a voice, and get a standard M4B audiobook playable in Apple Books, AudioBookshelf, and more. Transparent pricing, no account or subscription required. Download a free sample audiobook of the public domain work Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , narrated by Emma. Pick from our selection of natural-sounding Kokoro voices. Click a voice to hear a sample. For years I've collected written material I've wanted read aloud: e-books that are out of copyright, conference notes, my own writing, and more. Old text-to-speech models were not tolerable for long-form content, and the new AI voices are genuinely good. Kokoro voices are open, reliable, and professional — good enough to…from ebookaloud.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
AI Voices by Asyncflow v1.02025 · async.com · ▲401Premium AI voice quality without the premium price tag.
I generated 70k audiobooks with OpenAI Text-to-Speech2024 · listenly.io · ▲140Hey 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…
Affordable text-to-speech for long-form content2024 · audiowaveai.com · ▲55Hi HN, I’m Michael, creator of AudiowaveAI. I started this project out of frustration when I couldn't find an audiobook version of Make by Pieter Levels. The available text-to-speech options were either too robotic, overly complex, or simply too costly. It works really well for non-fiction long-form content (i.e. hours of audio). It’s early days for AudiowaveAI, and I’m looking for feedback to improve the product. Try it out and share your thoughts: [AudiowaveAI](https://audiowaveai.com). Thanks!
Local ReaderJan 2026 · chromewebstore.google.com · ▲6I made an on-device AI TTS extension using the WebGPU implementation of Kokoro TTS, the highest-rated open source TTS according to TTS arena. It runs model inference fully in your browser, so no server costs and it's secure. It was pretty easy to get the TTS working since the hard part (inference in javascript/webAssembly/webGPU) was done for me. I added some quality of life features on top: click to jump to a different paragraph, alt j & k for down and up, speed control, and voices (though the default voice has the highest quality). I made the extension mainly because I noticed…
More life & fun this month
the category →
A free city-building game in your browser. You are the mayor. You know what the city needs. Now get it past the zoning board, the neighbors, the appeals court and the next election.
Life & fun · 3d ago · permit.petercai.com
- IV
Life & fun · 15d ago · tanzaniaeducationproject.org
Turn a phone, tablet or TV into a sign. Type a message and it fills the screen: welcome signs, timers, Wi-Fi passwords and more. No app, no account, free.
Life & fun · 16d ago · bigwords.page
Play a free virtual guitar online with your keyboard or by touch. Slow songs down and see every chord, string and strum. Acoustic, classic, electric and bass.
Life & fun · 10d ago · guitoro.com
Carrier settings from iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy firmware, decoded and compared: APNs, VoLTE, 5G and Wi-Fi Calling per carrier, and what each build changed.
Life & fun · 14d ago · carrierexplode.com
Life & fun · 24d ago · space.bl2.net
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, June 2026
the whole month →
Fundraisly▲1,537AI fundraising agent that finds investors and books meetings
AI · Jun 2026 · fundraisly.com
Homebrew 6.0.0▲1,481Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 6.0.0. The most significant changes since 5.1.0 are a new tap trust security mechanism, the new faster, smaller, default internal Homebrew JSON API, sandboxing on Linux, better defaults informed by our user survey, many brew bundle improvements, improved performance and initial support for macOS 27 (Golden Gate). Happy to discuss any questions here!
Dev tools · Jun 2026 · brew.sh
Hi HN! I was super frustrated at apps like tiktok and wechat preventing me from saving or downloading the animated gifs, so I made a little tool to turn a screen recording into a slack-sized emoji. Hope you get some value from this!
Life & fun · Jun 2026 · vorpus.github.io
Search 18 years of Hacker News and chart how any topic, tool, or person trended. Overlay terms to compare their rise and fall across 45M posts and comments.
Life & fun · Jun 2026 · hackernewstrends.com