Oration (iOS) turns pdfs into audiobooks
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,…
Oration (iOS) turns pdfs into audiobooks launched on February 9, 2024 with 84 votes, #750 of 3,962 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Oration is an iOS app that converts PDFs into audiobooks, addressing limitations of standard text-to-speech tools. It's designed for students, auditory learners, and people with ADHD or dyslexia who struggle with dense written documents. The app intelligently handles complex PDF formatting, allows skipping citations and footnotes, and properly processes tables and graphs. It offers both summarized and full-length versions of PDFs for a more accessible reading experience.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Speechify Gen 0.12017 · speechify.com · ▲256Read faster, stay focused & absorb more - Create Audiobooks

- RIReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio2024 · readtome-app.com · ▲74
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,…
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…
Orate – On-device neural text-to-speech queue for MacJul 2026 · orate.to · ▲17Hey 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.…
More work this month
the category →
Endless lofi beats composed live in your browser, over pixel-art nights in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco and more. Free, no sign-up.
Work · 26d ago · loficities.com
Smooth Recorder▲257Mac screen recordings that look edited when you hit stop
Work · 20d ago · smoothrecorder.com


Work · 14d ago · readrare.com
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, February 2024
the whole month →


MarketingIdeas.com▲1,230Never run out of marketing ideas ever again
Growth · 2024 · marketingideas.com

