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Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio

readtome-app.com

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Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio

#21

Post by kolchinski »

tamimio wrote: post #4
kolchinski wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, true (for now) — which language(s) are you looking for? The APIs I'm using are mostly multilingual so it'd be doable to extend to other languages.

That would be great! Nothing specific, but it would be nice to have feature if ever implemented.

Makes sense, one other interesting use case would be looping in translation into the middle of the pipeline so that you could scan a book in a language you don't speak and have it read to you in a language you do speak.

Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio

#23

Post by gnicholas »

riscy wrote: post #22
kolchinski wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Azure's TTS API — I'm using four of their voices.

Why not use Siri / the native TTS solution on iOS?

The native TTS is not great. It doesn't sound like Siri — it's much robotic.

Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio

#25

Post by ghufran_syed »

blatherard wrote: post #24

Sounds cool, have you looked into potential copyright issues?

I looked into a startup working on a similar problem - as long as the digital text and audio are for personal use, I think it should be ok (or at least, not worth going after). If it's possible to share with other users or post the output online, then I think there would be a problem - though unless it was being shared in the app, it's the distribution part that would probably attract adverse legal attention, not the scanning and ocr which has been around for a long time.

Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio

#26

Post by kolchinski »

diogomqbm wrote: post #20
kolchinski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just took a look, their lower-quality model is almost exactly the same price as Azure TTS, and the quality is similar. Thanks for the pointer.

Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio

#28

Post by unfoldedCravat »

gnicholas wrote: post #23
riscy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use Siri / the native TTS solution on iOS?

The native TTS is not great. It doesn't sound like Siri — it's much robotic.

It can sound significantly better but there’s a couple hoops you have to jump through - and even then it’s decent, but not the same as Siri.

You need the user to download ‘enhanced’ or ‘premium’ voices in the settings app. (Settings -> Accessibility-> Spoken Content -> Voices -> [Language of choice] -> [Voice of choice] -> Enhanced or Premium)

In the app you have to search for the enhanced or premium voices when doing TTS.

Heres an Objective C example, I’m sure there’s an easier way to write it in Swift. https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-iOS/pull/1156/commits/0b...

I’m not sure if you’ll find this acceptable from a UX point of view but there’s an option to play with if you’d like.

Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio

#29

Post by gnicholas »

unfoldedCravat wrote: post #28
gnicholas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The native TTS is not great. It doesn't sound like Siri — it's much robotic.

It can sound significantly better but there’s a couple hoops you have to jump through - and even then it’s decent, but not the same as Siri. You need the user to download ‘enhanced’ or ‘premium’ voices in the settings app. (Settings -> Accessibility-> Spoken Content -> Voices -> [Language of choice] -> [Voice of choice] -> Enhanced or Premium) In the app you have to search for the enhanced or premium voices when doin…

Yeah, I use a premium voice but was still disappointed when we added the feature to my reader app. I decided to leave it in the app since we'd already built it at that point, but it's kind of a bummer since obviously they could use Siri-level TTS if they wanted to.

Re: Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio

#30

Post by Gys »

kolchinski wrote: post #15
Gys wrote: post #11

Love 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?

I know someone who will love this for Dutch.

You might also consider to add a translation option. For example to read a French text which will immediately be translated to English.

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