I generated 70k audiobooks with OpenAI Text-to-Speech
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…
I generated 70k audiobooks with OpenAI Text-to-Speech launched on July 14, 2024 with 140 votes, #466 of 5,184 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
In plain words
Listenly is an app that converts public domain e-books from Project Gutenberg into audiobooks using OpenAI's text-to-speech technology. Users can browse a catalog of approximately 70,000 books and listen to them on-demand, with audio generated gradually as users access each title rather than all at once. The app is designed for people who prefer audio versions of classic literature and other public domain texts.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Find your next listen. Discover free books, essays, and feeds, explore popular audiobooks, and browse by author or subject.
In the maker’s words, at launch
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.…
Pricing, as stated on its site
Free tier, paid plans from $15/mo — Free tier includes 20 minutes of audio with Standard voices. Pay-as-you-go pricing: Standard voices at ~$1.50/hour, HD voices at ~$3.50/hour. Prepaid credit packages starting at $15.
checked October 2026 · prices change
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Speechify Gen 0.12017 · speechify.com · ▲256Read faster, stay focused & absorb more - Create Audiobooks
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!
- OIOration (iOS) turns pdfs into audiobooks2024 · oration.app · ▲84
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,…
ttsopenai.com - Text To Speech OpenAI2024 · ▲13PDF, eBooks to Audiobooks, MP3 with OpenAI Text To Speech
More growth this month
the category →
wallhop is a free paywall bypass. Paste any article link to read it without paywall popups, ads or clutter. No signup, no extension. A simple 12ft.io alternative.
Growth · 12d ago · wallhop.io
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, July 2024
the whole month →
Many years ago, I made VJ softwares (to mix live visuals in clubs) for unexpected platforms like the Game Boy Advance, the Playstation 2 and the Raspberry Pi. This year, I’m back with a new web-app: Pikimov. Inspired by Photopea (a free Photoshop clone), I created this web-based motion design & video editor as an alternative to After Effects, to fill empty void. It's free, without signup, without cloud uploads (your files stay on your machine), and your projects are not used for AI models training.
AI · 2024 · pikimov.com
