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Automating Immersive Reading

smoores.dev

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: Automating Immersive Reading

#31

What is the purpose of this outside people with disabilities? Why do you need word highlighting, it's like those TikToks and IG reels where they show one word at a time to keep you hooked. Surely, if you need this to read a book (again, besides any disabilities), you should stop your current habits.

Well, first of all, lots of people specifically do use this because they have print disabilities or neurodivergence that makes it challenging to read long stretches of text.

Also, disability isn't binary? Some people have an easier time reading text than others — is your argument that books should remain less accessible to those people for whom it's harder because you don't personally feel like they should need it?

And then there are _lots_ of people that just enjoy reading this way. Audiobook production is its own art form, and many people like experiencing the text and the audio together. For some people it helps them focus in a noisy environment, for some people they find they can read faster with the narration, and some people just enjoy it.

Every single time I post about Storyteller, there are multiple people in the comments insisting that this shouldn't exist because no one should ever consume books differently from how they do. I don't understand it, honestly. If you don't want to read books this way, that's totally fine! You can even still use Storyteller — it works great with plain EPUBs. Why the need to make others feel bad for the way they engage with stories? The world is a better place if more people read more books — discouraging people from reading books in the way that feels pleasant and accessible to them makes the world worse.

I think if you feel compelled to instruct people you don't know to "stop their current habits" because you don't personally understand their needs or wants, perhaps you should reconsider your current habits, yourself.

Re: Automating Immersive Reading

#32
post #29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I don't know what you're referring to. Is the text too small for you? I wrote the blog post on FF for Linux and FF for Android, and I didn't need to zoom in to review it, though some of the graphics do definitely end up with pretty small text on mobile.

xubuntu, 2x iiyama IVM610F those are 24" 1920x1200, firefox latest. For some reason when I open hn it's readable. When I open your site it's.. not.

You gotta give me more than that haha. It's not readable in what way?

Re: Automating Immersive Reading

#33
post #32
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xubuntu, 2x iiyama IVM610F those are 24" 1920x1200, firefox latest. For some reason when I open hn it's readable. When I open your site it's.. not.

You gotta give me more than that haha. It's not readable in what way?

Okay.

It is a small font within a small column which wastes like 60+% space of a screen, and I use tabs, eh? Tabs are not windows, I will not resize my browser just because of one single tab.

This is a horizontal 24" 1920x1200, not a fucking phone.

so I respectfully plead for you and everyone else to forget those ridiculous horizontal margins.

Re: Automating Immersive Reading

#34
post #2

I took a week of from work recently to reimplement Storyteller's forced alignment algorithm. Storyteller[1] is an open source, self hosted platform for creating, managing, and reading/listening to "readaloud" books — books that have audiobook narration built in and can highlight each sentence (and/or word, with this new algorithm!) as it's read aloud. Forced alignment is the process of determining where each piece of…

Any plans to offer a way to generate audio books on demand. like if i set kokoro, a book auto imports, it can make the file for me for the whole book after some time of local gpu work?

Re: Automating Immersive Reading

#35

What is the purpose of this outside people with disabilities? Why do you need word highlighting, it's like those TikToks and IG reels where they show one word at a time to keep you hooked. Surely, if you need this to read a book (again, besides any disabilities), you should stop your current habits.

It's helpful for learning a foreign language to read a text while simultaneously listening to it. But when you're not very good at the language yet, you'll likely often fall behind. Word highlighting makes it easy to get back on track. I assume people just learning to read their first language would similarly benefit.

Re: Automating Immersive Reading

#36

What is the purpose of this outside people with disabilities? Why do you need word highlighting, it's like those TikToks and IG reels where they show one word at a time to keep you hooked. Surely, if you need this to read a book (again, besides any disabilities), you should stop your current habits.

Even if you don't use the immersive reading feature, it's really nice to be able to switch back & forth from reading to listening. It's nice to be able to start reading right from the sentence where you left off listening to the audiobook. Storyteller is a great e-reader and audiobook player regardless of if you use the immersive reading.

Also, it's just fun to have the audio narration as you read. I typically set the speed to like 2.5x when doing readaloud.

Re: Automating Immersive Reading

#37
post #2

I took a week of from work recently to reimplement Storyteller's forced alignment algorithm. Storyteller[1] is an open source, self hosted platform for creating, managing, and reading/listening to "readaloud" books — books that have audiobook narration built in and can highlight each sentence (and/or word, with this new algorithm!) as it's read aloud. Forced alignment is the process of determining where each piece of…

This is excellent! I wanted this. I had noticed that Kindle had limited feature like this for certain books that support audiobooks. I had tried this style of reading with audiobook and ebook without a any automated sync, but hadn't pursued it. This looks cool. :)

In Kindle you must pay for the ebook and audiobook to make it work

Re: Automating Immersive Reading

#39
This is very interesting. I do something related: matching student oral reading transcripts back against the text they were assigned to read.Students will misread then re-read a sentence, skip sentences, skip paragraphs etc.

I think its similar because we both seek to assign audio time stamps to sentences and words.

But I wonder why your forced alignment algorithm is so heavy duty. (My head started to spin at CTC emissions. ) Probably yours is just way more thorough than mine,

My simplistic approach would have been to transcribe the audio. And then run a differencing script chapter by chapter matching the book text with the audio transcript. And then do something similar intra chapter to get sentence and word level time stamps.

Re: Automating Immersive Reading

#40
post #2

I took a week of from work recently to reimplement Storyteller's forced alignment algorithm. Storyteller[1] is an open source, self hosted platform for creating, managing, and reading/listening to "readaloud" books — books that have audiobook narration built in and can highlight each sentence (and/or word, with this new algorithm!) as it's read aloud. Forced alignment is the process of determining where each piece of…

Cool! S an avid reader, Whispersync is one of the things that keeps me paying Amazon/Audible. Competition and viable OSS alternatives would be great!
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