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Comment by zacmps | Hacker News Reader

What does it do?

Convert any file (pdf, epub, txt) to an audoibook, downloadable as mp3, or directly listenable via RSS feed in, say, Apple Potcasts app.

Basically make one-off audiobooks for yourself or a few friends.

Any plans to make a Chrome extension variant? Been looking for a high quality and cheap TTS extension for ages (like ElevenLabs Human Reader, except with less absurd pricing)

I din't think of that, interesting idea. What I'm focusing right now is long-form content for more offline-ish listening, but maybe a plugin could work to load longer texts, but I'm not working on a screen reader atm.

Do you know if there's any offerings today that can read math? Like speak an equation the way a human would? It's something I've been thinking about a long time and would be an essential feature for me (the only things i read are physics)

I saw a small model trained on outputting currency aware text from decimals/integers

i wonder if you could make a similar -narrow- lora finetune to train a model to output human readable text from say latext formulas with a good data set to train on

What is your use-case here?

Primarily for reading articles aloud online. I've been trying the latest Siri TTS which is a big improvement (and free), but it's still nowhere near accurate enough for proper nouns or newer terms, which ElevenLabs handles much better.

For anyone else reading this, librera reader + sherpaTTS are both FOSS android apps and can read anything librera can open on an ad-hoc basis, with no need to futz with files, just load your ebook bookmark and hit play.

SherpaTTS has a bunch of different models (piper/coqui) with a ton of voices/languages. There's a slight but tolerable delay with piper high models but low is realtime.

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