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Comment by lukebuehler | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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