Love it! But should be for all languages
Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
#12Were the onboard text recognition and speech synthesis APIs not good enough for this task?
Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
#13Love this but I have concerns with the price. You can usually find an audiobook corresponding to a paper book for relatively cheap. Services like Audible are a little more per month but you get more audio books. Given the 250 page per month limit at $9.99, how will this compete?
Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's Azure's TTS API — I'm using four of their voices.
Did you give any thought to ElevenLabs?
Yes, their quality is great but the cost is astronomical — I pay about $8 in Azure TTS bills alone for TTS-ing a 500-page book (what you can scan per month with a $10 subscription), whereas Eleven Labs would be about $100 for the same length. I found Azure to be the best bang-for-the-buck, although I'm on the lookout for more affordable high-quality TTS, which would also let me drop the price point of the app.
Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
#15Love it! But should be for all languages
All languages will be tough but adding common ones that are already supported by off-the-shelf OCR, TTS, and LLMs is definitely doable; do you have any that you're most keen on?
Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
#16It seems to me that there are 3 independent issues.
1 scanning the books to text.
2 reading text to the user.
3 having a good interface.
Number 1 seems to be where you put the most effort, along with 3.
I guess at least for me, there are often digital copies of books, either in epub or Kindle. When that's available those should be used.
And if it is not available, wouldn't it make more sense to have document scanner to epub?
I guess I'm just thinking that it is relatively rare that you really need to document scanning in order to get an audio book. Since most of the cost seems to be from document scanner side, it seems worthwhile to split them up.
And also seems like it would make sense to think of these as 2 separate products. Specialized document scanning, and audio generation. I can definitely see uses for one without the other.
Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
#17Were the onboard text recognition and speech synthesis APIs not good enough for this task?
iOS has pretty decent built-in OCR and TTS but give it a try on a book page if you're curious — unfortunately the OCR makes a lot of mistakes (as well as including footnotes etc.) and the TTS is still pretty robotic. I do hope and expect they'll improve soon, though, at which point the only advantage of this app will be that it can scan multiple pages at a time — probably not enough of an advantage to justify its existence at that point although I'll see what users say. For now, as far as I've seen it's the highest-quality option for this (granted, very niche) paper-to-audio use case.
Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
#18Love this but I have concerns with the price. You can usually find an audiobook corresponding to a paper book for relatively cheap. Services like Audible are a little more per month but you get more audio books. Given the 250 page per month limit at $9.99, how will this compete?
Yeah I (and my fiancée) are also Audible users — this app is mostly for cases where an audiobook or even e-book don't exist, like for older books you might get from a used bookstore or library. I'd prefer to set the price point lower, but if a user uses their 250-scan quota (which can be up to 500 pages, since you can scan 2 at a time) fully, I'll actually be losing about $10 on them that month, so I'm hoping not everyone uses their full quota!
That said, I'm expecting OCR, LLM, and TTS API prices to continue coming down, at which point I'll be able to drop the price and raise the quota. Honestly I suspect iOS itself should be able to handle this use case well sooner or later, but until then, there's this app :).
Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
#19It seems to me that there are 3 independent issues. 1 scanning the books to text. 2 reading text to the user. 3 having a good interface. Number 1 seems to be where you put the most effort, along with 3. I guess at least for me, there are often digital copies of books, either in epub or Kindle. When that's available those should be used. And if it is not available, wouldn't it make more sense to have document scanner…
Yes this is a very valid point, on a technical level it's definitely a 2-step thing. From a product perspective I'm framing it as a "this app reads books out loud to you" but if I start hearing about people using it to grab the text out (which is possible right now) I'll definitely consider paying more attention to that use case.
Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you give any thought to ElevenLabs?
Yes, their quality is great but the cost is astronomical — I pay about $8 in Azure TTS bills alone for TTS-ing a 500-page book (what you can scan per month with a $10 subscription), whereas Eleven Labs would be about $100 for the same length. I found Azure to be the best bang-for-the-buck, although I'm on the lookout for more affordable high-quality TTS, which would also let me drop the price point of the app.
did you try the openAI pricing? how does it look?