Show HN: Free audiobooks with synchronized text for language learning | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Free audiobooks with synchronized text for language learning

discovox.org

22 pointsfloo15 comments

For those interested in doing this themselves, there’s some great existing software to create EPUB3 files with the audiobook aligned with text.

https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/

https://codeberg.org/richwaters/StoryAlign

oh that looks amazing. can't believe I didn't find these during research. thanks for pointing them out!

hey HN! this is my attempt at language learning with audiobooks. it synchronizes text to speech, and shows translations. the audiobooks themselves are all public domain.

got all of the audio alignment, translation, and asset generation working on my gaming computer. pretty happy with the pipeline, except for the sometimes subpar translations.

if anyone is interested in the details I am happy to write them up!

if you are into language learning, I would love to hear if this could be useful to you!

Hi. Interesting idea.

Just a heads up: the text is not displayed on my Firefox (140.8.0esr 64bit, Win11) however. On Edge it is displayed correctly.

thanks for pointing that out. should have checked availability of view animation timelines.

will make sure it falls back to fully visible text.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

got that fixed, now. thanks again for pointing it out!

Looks great - Exactly what I’m looking for. Could we get different dialects? For Spanish, I would love to be able to select a country for the audio. At least a Latin American version to start. Thanks for sharing.

cool idea. haven't really explored dialects yet. gonna see if I can find any latin american recordings. thanks for the suggestion!

The pronunciation is different between countries. Not sure about other differences between dialects, but from what I remember from studying years ago, word pronunciation differences were quite predictable. There were a couple of online dictionaries with audio for Spain, Mexico and perhaps Argentina.

This is great! More beginner level stories would be much appreciated.

thanks, that's a really good point. having some beginner friendly books for each language is definitely a goal.

are you looking for stories in a specific language?

Oh yes, please add spanish (peru)!

This is fantastic!

I've been meaning to learn Spanish, and this looks super useful.

Would love to learn more about your pipeline [selfishly, I was looking to build (free) ebooks -> audio for my own purposes as a side project]

What were the most challenging aspects? What assumptions failed / held true? Any experiences to share? Thx

glad to hear it!

went through quite a few iterations of aligning text to speech. found that ai transcription was really good most of the time but would hallucinate quite a bit towards the start and end of books. which I think might be related to those models being partially trained on audiobooks, and only having the book text itself, without any of the intro or credits.

in the end I landed on extracting text from ebooks, using rule based and language specific segmentation, and espeak based alignment. pretty basic, but it worked wonders in terms of reliability and accuracy.

if you are looking to generate audio from ebooks this is probably not too helpful. it is something I tried to avoid. something about learning a languages from generated audio didn't sit right with me haha.

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