Show HN: An open-source, self-hostable synced narration platform for ebooks

Amazing! I&#x27;ve made a similar ebooks-audiobooks aligner years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;r4victor&#x2F;syncabook">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;r4victor&#x2F;syncabook</a>. At that time, I chose to synthesize the text and align two audio sequences because I found texts-alignment approaches (including ML-based ones) too compute-intensive and inadequate for long texts. I see Storyteller works by aligning the texts. Could you give some view on how long it takes to sync a book?<p>Also, my experience was that audio and text versions are often very different (e.g. the audio having an intro missing from the text). It&#x27;d be very interesting to know how well Storyteller handles such cases. Does it require manual audio&#x2F;text editing or handle the differences automatically?

This is really neat, it&#x27;s something I hadn&#x27;t thought about before. I&#x27;ve started listening to audiobooks on my commute, but I read at night. I currently use audiobookshelf[0] to listen to my ebooks, and it has support for ebooks as well. I&#x27;ve added a comment[1] on a discussion if audiobookshelf could read the epubs your took creates.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.audiobookshelf.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.audiobookshelf.org&#x2F;</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;advplyr&#x2F;audiobookshelf&#x2F;issues&#x2F;189#issuecomment-1868505882">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;advplyr&#x2F;audiobookshelf&#x2F;issues&#x2F;189#issueco...</a>

I absolutely love this. However, my wife and kids all read EPUBS on kobo e-readers, so I wish we could somehow sync the last page read from kobo to Storyteller so that we could pick up on audiobook later. I’m not opposed to installing koreader on all of our kobos either if that would be required for syncing… it does look like koreader doesn’t support epub3 media overlays, but it does have a sync feature.

Wow, this really blew up while I wasn&#x27;t looking! Thank you everyone who&#x27;s popped in here to ask questions and give feedback. If anyone does spend some time trying to set this up, please don&#x27;t hesitate to hop into our Gitter channel (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smoores.gitlab.io&#x2F;storyteller&#x2F;docs&#x2F;say-hi" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smoores.gitlab.io&#x2F;storyteller&#x2F;docs&#x2F;say-hi</a>) and say hi or ask for support or give feedback.

More information would be nice, a link to the iOS app or screenshots or what features the project have.<p>Is it a ebook&#x2F;a book library like audiobookshelf with sync or just sync? ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.audiobookshelf.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.audiobookshelf.org&#x2F;</a> )

Super cool project!<p>&gt; even though there&#x27;s still a lot more to do<p>A few have asked on this thread already, but since you&#x27;re already using AI to transcibe, it would be super cool if we can use AI to generate audio using TTS<p>I quit audible (signed up a few times) because there are very few high quality audio book, even those spoke by the authors are bad (most of them are not pro narrator)<p>A good AI would be amazing, as they never get tired speaking for hours, yet maintaining the same energetic voice, intonation and pace.

This is pretty interesting...<p>I once wrote a similar thing for building a custom LJSPEECH dataset out of ebook&#x2F;audiobook combinations to synthesize my favorite narrator voices using coqui-tts and the VITS model and make them &quot;publish&quot; books that never came out as audiobook.<p>It was able to synchronize the book contents to timestamps, split the spoken word in to sentences and create a LJSPEECH datasets out of the combinations. I used aeneas[1], it was a bit finicky to set up, but after a while it even was able to map non-english languages (in my case german) with more than 80% accuracy. Worked out pretty well, the LJSPEECH datasets were good (I still have them here), but the TTS tech was not there yet :-) Maybe it&#x27;s time to revive this project using newer modelling approaches like XTTS or something...<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.readbeyond.it&#x2F;aeneas&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.readbeyond.it&#x2F;aeneas&#x2F;</a>

You didn&#x27;t include the link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smoores.gitlab.io&#x2F;storyteller&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smoores.gitlab.io&#x2F;storyteller&#x2F;</a><p>Looks super nice, the next step is to build a fully synced ecosystem for book management.

What I really want to get from the new era of machine learning we supposedly are coming through is human-quality self-hosted text-to-speech and speech-to-text so I would be able to listen to text ebooks and convert big podcasts and video&#x2F;audio lecture courses to text making it easy to search through them and quote phrases from them. Is this it? Whatever I could find so far were either significantly worse than a human could do or expensive online services.

Amazing, I’ve been wanting something like this for years. If only Libby would integrate this so it could be used with rented books.<p>It would be great if you could add a link to the app on the App Store.

Looks great! Is there an e-ink e-reader it’s compatible with? Would love to abandon the Amazon castle but could not go back to reading on a screen.

Looks like an interesting project.<p>I do highly suggest that a quick intro demo video and&#x2F;or screen shots of a tool like this would be beneficial to the project.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing and working on this! WhisperSync functionality is a game-changer; it&#x27;s one of the main reasons I&#x27;m able to read so much (switching modalities several times per day). I&#x27;d love to see this featureset become ubiquitous instead of being so tightly coupled to proprietary, DRM&#x27;d Amazon &#x2F; Audible.

Looks really nice. I wanted to do exactly this with my project Kavita, but have been distracted with other things. I&#x27;ve heard Whisper has great potential and a few of my users have been doing something similar with it.<p>Look forward to see how this project matures. We need more options in the book reading scene that are self-hosted and not Calibre.

This looks absolutely incredible, and like something I’ve been trying to find for years! Thank you so much building this!

How does the narration work, is it automatically generated? For a year now I have a long commute and listen to audiobooks. However I find the narration vary wildly in quality and think oftentimes text-to-speech might actually be better

Good job! I&#x27;m probably going to use this. Would love to have my collection accessible from mobile. A small &quot;nit&quot;. Would be great to have non-docker installation instructions readily available.

This looks awesome. I might be missing it somewhere, but what&#x27;s the minimum required hardware to run something like this locally?

Can this function as &quot;Plex for audiobooks&quot;? I don&#x27;t really have a need for synced books but it would be nice to keep fewer audiobooks on my phone.

Is there a demo of the narration? I couldn’t find any

This is super cool, I love my audiobook app (Prologue) but this could tempt me away. Looking forward to setting this up and trying it out!

Is there a tool that would convert ebook to a single (or a set of) mp3?

Thank you for your hard work!!

Does it sync the reading progress of the ebook among clients?

This works only for drm-free ebooks and audiobooks?

man.. if someone could hook the creation service into audiobookshelf this could be an extremely potent combination..