Show HN: Convert Podcasts to EBooks
github.com
Yes, I said "AI"...It's all the rage these days.
The conversion happens using the open.ai Whisper general model. You can change the language and model size on this line whisper.load_model("medium.en"). It may run faster or slower with more (or less) accuracy using other models. All's I can say is to test it out and see what happens.
It doesn't currently do diarization (speaker identification). I've started working on this in the diarization branch, but haven't gotten too far. PR's are welcome.
The idea for transcribing podcasts to ebooks (pod2book) came about whilst listening to a podcast that was very scientific, with a lot of details. I wanted to capture what the person was saying and be able to go back and review, highlight, create notes, study, etc. Then came different podcasts I wanted to do the same thing with. Well, necessity being the mother of invention, I coded something on up and it worked pretty good.
I then thought to myself, “Self, this could also be valuable for other people that are neurodivergent, or just like to read.” I also shared the idea with someone else, and they were like, “Oh yeah that would help people that are deaf or hard of hearing too.” I wish I thought of that part myself.
Podcast transcripts are nice and all, but difficult to find and organize. What I would really like is to have a storefront/library that has all these podcasts-turned-eBooks organized by author that could then be subscribed to on your eBook reader of choice. Perhaps the eBooks could even be broken down into volumes like, Volume 1 would include episodes 1-50 and volume 2 would have episodes 51-100, etc.
Well, since I don’t own the copyright to any of these, I didn’t think it wise to try something like that. I shopped it around a little bit, then figured, what they hay, just open source it and let the people have at it and create their own libraries.
Use Calibre.
Thanks, -Ben
P.S.
There are other hn posts that go the other way...from text (or eBooks) to podcasts:
https://www.charlieharrington.com/flow-and-creative-computin...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42376356
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25117894
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894856
I didn't see anything on hn or elsewhere in my limited research that already had the functionality of podcasts->ebooks.