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Hacker News

I started playing the audio. I liked it. The text was right there matching what I was hearing. I just wish that it highlighted the word in the audio. I'd much prefer a tts version that does that, even if the voice quality is worse. There was a disconnect between my eyes and ears and it felt off.

by tim-projects

I installed this as a PWA on my Pixel, and for some reason it keeps auto-rotating (to landscape mode), despite having disabled auto-rotation on my phone.

Is it something you intentionally want or need? It makes it impossible for me to read in bed.

by JunoNgx

Forced alignment using CTC over LibriVox recordings to sync text and audio is a brilliant use of compute. Whispersync for the open web—love it!

by khanhnguyen8386

Unrelated, but all I want is a letterboxd for books, with the light social aspect, the ability to log a read multiple times, and with a great interface. I read my hope for this into the title of this post, unfortunately.

by mplanchard

i've been building this over the last two weeks, it first started as a reader for standard ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/), with clean typography, progress tracking, and nice deep linking (try clicking on a paragraph to create a mark and copy it to your clipboard)

but i think i really unlocked something when i discovered the amazing recordings on https://librivox.org, i've been spending the last few days frying my macbook's gpu to do neural alignment so that you can sync an audiobook with its text counterpart, to make switching between the text and the audio seamless

it's a ctc forced-alignment over the whole audiobook, keyed to the same paragraph anchors i used for progress tracking and linking

i think it's really cool? let me know

by samuelcole

This is great! I would love an explicit "set bookmark to here" button if I scroll up from the high watermark

I discovered the reset, but it took a minute and I expect given the way I read being able to explicitly walk the high watermark back a bit would be nice (maybe that's doable if you select text? I didn't try!)

The format is nice, I love standard ebooks

I opened Moby Dick but didn't see how to listen to it on my phone, not sure what the status of the "listen" effort is.

I listened to some books from standard ebooks using eleven labs, but I'm really excited about a better implementation

by wrsh07

We have many homes for fiction already. Mine is my ebook reader. For many it's their bookshelf or local library.

First impression: autoplay of noisy audio when you go to a book is awful. Please don't do this.

> Humanity has a massive corpus of fiction, thanks to copyright law...

Seems a strange thing to credit first.

https://tale.fyi/tell says you need to sign in to tell your own story, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that (I'm on Firefox Android).

by mkl

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  • Hacker News
  • I started playing the audio. I liked it. The text was right there matching what I was hearing. I just wish that it highlighted the word in the audio. I'd much prefer a tts version that does that, even if the voice quality is worse. There was a disconnect between my eyes and ears and it felt off.
  • I installed this as a PWA on my Pixel, and for some reason it keeps auto-rotating (to landscape mode), despite having disabled auto-rotation on my phone.

    Is it something you intentionally want or need? It makes it impossible for me to read in bed.

  • Forced alignment using CTC over LibriVox recordings to sync text and audio is a brilliant use of compute. Whispersync for the open web—love it!
  • Unrelated, but all I want is a letterboxd for books, with the light social aspect, the ability to log a read multiple times, and with a great interface. I read my hope for this into the title of this post, unfortunately.
  • i've been building this over the last two weeks, it first started as a reader for standard ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/), with clean typography, progress tracking, and nice deep linking (try clicking on a paragraph to create a mark and copy it to your clipboard)

    but i think i really unlocked something when i discovered the amazing recordings on https://librivox.org, i've been spending the last few days frying my macbook's gpu to do neural alignment so that you can sync an audiobook with its text counterpart, to make switching between the text and the audio seamless

    it's a ctc forced-alignment over the whole audiobook, keyed to the same paragraph anchors i used for progress tracking and linking

    i think it's really cool? let me know

  • This is great! I would love an explicit "set bookmark to here" button if I scroll up from the high watermark

    I discovered the reset, but it took a minute and I expect given the way I read being able to explicitly walk the high watermark back a bit would be nice (maybe that's doable if you select text? I didn't try!)

    The format is nice, I love standard ebooks

    I opened Moby Dick but didn't see how to listen to it on my phone, not sure what the status of the "listen" effort is.

    I listened to some books from standard ebooks using eleven labs, but I'm really excited about a better implementation

  • We have many homes for fiction already. Mine is my ebook reader. For many it's their bookshelf or local library.

    First impression: autoplay of noisy audio when you go to a book is awful. Please don't do this.

    > Humanity has a massive corpus of fiction, thanks to copyright law...

    Seems a strange thing to credit first.

    https://tale.fyi/tell says you need to sign in to tell your own story, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that (I'm on Firefox Android).

    by mkl
  • > the internet was being built around non-fiction

    I guess you don't tread the same internet waters.

    https://www.royalroad.com/home https://archiveofourown.org/ and the good old link rings like https://topwebfiction.com/

    by arkh