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Show HN: Use your OpenAI subscription to create audiobooks

174 points janpmz 4 days ago 90 comments

embedding-shape 4 days ago | parent

> Use the AI you already pay for

I thought this would mean I could use my subscription, as OpenAI/Codex supports this kind of authentication flow, and it's very easy to integrate with that as a service, and users login with the OpenAI authentication flow, or via device codes.

Instead this asks for an API key, which is very different from "Use your OpenAI subscription" and to be honest, I'm not sure how anyone who has a OpenAI subscription could mistake this for such. Has this even been tested once?

Maybe I missed something obvious, I had a five second look and closed it when it seemed to be outright intentionally misleading.

wastewastewaste 4 days ago | parent

title literally says "Use your OpenAI subscription to create audiobooks" so im also confused lol

edit: i guess this explains it, its sorta half half

Your subscription will be used for:

    document processing (via MCP)already paid by your subscription
Your API key will be used for:

    generating speechOpenAI charges per usage

janpmz 4 days ago | parent

There are two parts to the processing. The processing of the document itself is done on your OpenAI/Codex subscription. Additionally, you have to submit an API key for the text-to-speech processing. There you can use a Gemini key or an OpenAI key.

scrollop 4 days ago | parent

The title is misleading - should be "Use your openai subscription AND a TTS api key"

Much less interesting.

kaoD 3 days ago | parent

Not to mention the very prominent "$0 PDF to MP3".

xenocratus 4 days ago | parent

I did something very similar to this, for myself, but which takes a web page for an article, cleans up the text to preserve the article only, and converts it using TTS, then adds it to a cloud bucket with an RSS stream, and I use that RSS link as a podcast in Apple Podcast.

_ink_ 4 days ago | parent

Sounds great! Any interest in open sourcing your approach?

xenocratus 3 days ago | parent

I might do, need to find some time to find a good balance between security and usability by others. It's currently running on the public web, so I had to have some funky security to prevent bots from triggering it and using my money for TTS :)

But worth noting that it took me a few hours to make, and it's all vibecoded, meaning the code is likely not that nice, and that you could probably replicate it fairly easily just from my description above.

If I make it OS I'll share it on Show HN.

robot_jesus 4 days ago | parent

Oh man. I did something similar but didn’t do the last mile with the cloud bucket and RSS stream and that seems key. I never have the energy to manually copy the mp3s over to the phone.

janpmz 4 days ago | parent

I did both of that too! At the end I made my own app to listen to the episodes.

exe34 4 days ago | parent

I have syncthing, I just copy a file into the shared folder.

cj00 4 days ago | parent

I did something similar and just put the files on an old laptop and used Tailscale. That gives me an https URL and Apple Podcasts downloads the files fine.

umeshunni 3 days ago | parent

I did an even simpler thing. I had it connect to gmail MCP and email it to me as an .mp3 file which I then play on my phone.

brumar 4 days ago | parent

Same here. 75% of my podcast listening time come from content generated by claude and voxtral these days (tts from mistral).

aaroninsf 4 days ago | parent

how do you find Voxtral quality?

brumar 3 days ago | parent

Very good. I have a listening experience close to elevenlabs. But sometimes you can get "failed" segments so you need to detect them and retry/repair automatically. One example is the fading volume.

sebzim4500 4 days ago | parent

What TTS do you use? I find the OpenAI ones really unpleasant to listen to and elevenlabs is better but still not quite right somehow.

kingforaday 4 days ago | parent

Try fish.audio - their S2 Pro has been very decent. The S2.1 Pro might be better but haven't had a chance to try it.

kolinko 4 days ago | parent

I do similar things, just use ElevenLabs for tts - a good selection of voices.

A good protip - tell an agent to rewrite the article slightly for better listening flow. Some subtle changes in sentence structure etc can make listening way more pleasant.

sgallant 4 days ago | parent

RSS -> Apple podcast. Love it!

BeetleB 4 days ago | parent

Same here.

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2024/Apr/reading-articles-via-p...

I use the TTS on Google Cloud. It's effectively free.

FrinkleFrankle 3 days ago | parent

Would you mind sharing, if you're open sourcing it?

x______________ 4 days ago | parent

Is "paste your OpenAI API key" the new form of "paste your credit card number with exp/code" for example, to check if its been compromised?

draugadrotten 4 days ago | parent

For those who do not want to paste OpenAIkeys to other peoples web pages, there are local solutions.

For example, these audiobook generators runs fully offline. https://github.com/Finrandojin/alexandria-audiobook https://github.com/senigami/audiobook-studio.pinokio https://github.com/topics/audiobook-generator

fnord77 4 days ago | parent

You don't even need that. Just paste your pdf in codex or the gpt work app and say make me an audio book from this with such and such kind of voice.

xnorswap 4 days ago | parent

> For those who do not want to paste OpenAIkeys to other peoples web pages

That should be everybody!

There are standard practices for delegating responsibility, never ever be pasting API keys into websites.

throwaway_19sz 4 days ago | parent

“Never ever” is crazy talk. Just put a couple of dollars in a prepaid account and assume it may all get used up. “Standard practices” won’t get you far in life.

munk-a 4 days ago | parent

I consider "Create a throwaway" to be in line with the guideline posted above. It does violate it literally but not in spirit - the guideline is not to use an API key with the ability to draw unlimited or a very large amount of funds.

throwaway_19sz 3 days ago | parent

Sure, but the comment I was replying to said “Everybody” and “never ever”.

14u2c 3 days ago | parent

Why? It's easy and predictable. Generate a key with a spend cap plus short expiry and you're set. I much prefer that to having to fork over my email with an OAuth flow.

yohannparis 4 days ago | parent

You can generate a specific API key, and make sure to monitor it by setting a budget limit to it. They should explain this to people in their form to avoid people pasting their main key.

walrus01 4 days ago | parent

There was a guy who made a "has your SSH key been compromised? Paste your private key here" website as a joke, which lasted about a week until his low budget host killed it.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fx...

1vuio0pswjnm7 4 days ago | parent

The original "Have I Been Pwned" ploy

Send me your data and I will check and see if anyone else has it

Now I have your data but that doesn't count

Onavo 4 days ago | parent

They do offer an OAuth method.

simianwords 4 days ago | parent

This shouldldve been a Plugin or Sign in with ChatGPT thing!

AndrewKemendo 3 days ago | parent

That doesn’t exist yet

laylower 4 days ago | parent

What prevents someone submitting an epub or a pdf and ask claude or another llm to narrate a novel in morgan freeman's voice?

springtimesun 4 days ago | parent

Claude has gotten pretty sensitive to copyright. In addition to the no song lyrics that was posted in another article, I also find it will not generally transcribe podcasts (you have to play with model versions and even effort inside that).

KellyCriterion 4 days ago | parent

Couple of weeks ago it refused to cite one of the public available EU-text from their gov site to me

AbsurdCensor 4 days ago | parent

At home this is super easy, use one of the multiple TTS models out there and provide a clean clip of Morgan Freeman's voice. Typically around 10 seconds will do. I just run a python script to daily scan my FreshRSS sources, compile my news and generate a 'podcast' that's about 10 minutes for a morning listen. Currently using F5-TTS, but there are lot's of other models out there as well.

properbrew 4 days ago | parent

> Currently using F5-TTS

Thanks for listing the model you're using, I've not really done any TTS stuff and this sounds like a fun thing to spin up.

jaccola 4 days ago | parent

Looks cool but how on earth does your demo video not show a sample of the result?! It ends right before the exciting part. Madness!

matthorse 4 days ago | parent

How well does it handle larger files? And other book formats, like epub or mobi?

I'd love to see an actual result what it can do

brunorsini 4 days ago | parent

Cool! Curious to hear a sample. As any regular audiobook listener knows, having a great narrator is really key.

janpmz 4 days ago | parent

Here you can listen to examples: https://pdftomp3.com/examples/

Via MCP more voices are available (all OpenAI and Gemini voices, depending on which api key you use).

brunorsini 4 days ago | parent

I like the voices, will be using the product soon. Thanks for sharing!

kubrickslair 4 days ago | parent

I tested it - the word highlight and audio spoken did not always align, leading to a discordant experience.

janpmz 2 days ago | parent

The experience has been improved now!

ph4rsikal 4 days ago | parent

Great work, op. I have also had good experiences with Qwen3-TTS. Might be worthwhile to explore for everyone who wants to do longform locally.

janpmz 4 days ago | parent

Thanks! Currently, I'm using Gemini TTS and Kokoro TTS as a free option. Kokoro is fast and I can run it on my own server, but I'm not using it as a standard yet because Gemini supports more languages and has more voices available. But text-to-speech processing is the biggest bottleneck at the moment.

abel0x 4 days ago | parent

how does it handle weird formatting in pdfs like tables or image captions? i always get trash output when doing pdf text extraction.

janpmz 4 days ago | parent

It handles the formatting of scientific papers very well. E.g. I can exclude footnotes etc. But I didn't test it much with tables yet.

abel0x 4 days ago | parent

makes sense, tables in pdfs are a nightmare anyway. cool project.

flatline 4 days ago | parent

I went the route of handling epub first (really, anything pandoc can convert to epub) on ebookaloud, and it took quite a few iterations to get consistent parsing across a wide corpus of test documents.

My experience is that gathering and testing with that corpus was about 30% of the overall effort. I have not yet gathered the motivation to tackle pdf: it’s more of a layout format than a text format. Not just tables but multi-column layouts and similar oddities leave a pile of imperfect heuristics in their wake.

Multi-lingual support is even worse. I was working with arabic script in pdf years ago and they don’t even capture the encoded text, just rendering instructions due to the high number of ligatures. I don’t know if things have improved since then.

amaldavid 4 days ago | parent

It was always harder to get it to sound right, I had built Lissin around this thesis itself. You can throw in a PDF or a link and can get a podcast, deepdive or just narration with different voices in Lissin.

For those interested in better voices, you can try and let me know.

https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6758897526?pt=12810...

lifeisloving 4 days ago | parent

If someone sends me AI generated audio they're reccomending, I from then on out see them differently and not in a good way. I dont even want to read the outputs of an LLM let alone listen to them. Wild.

BeetleB 4 days ago | parent

I suggest therapy. For you, not for them.

lifeisloving 4 days ago | parent

Why?

tupac_speedrap 4 days ago | parent

Simmer down, lad. Some of us actually enjoy interacting with humans and touch grass, we aren't all misanthropic turbonerds

platevoltage 3 days ago | parent

The fact that pushback from people who don't want their future to be relegated to interacting with robots gets downvoted on this site might be my cue to leave.

wing-_-nuts 4 days ago | parent

IMHO, AI voice has gotten good enough to be acceptable, but the pacing and cadence of speech is a dead give away that it's being read by AI

exolab 4 days ago | parent

You can build that with Claude in 2-3 hours. Not sure how this is a business idea.

therepanic 4 days ago | parent

minutes not hours

janpmz 4 days ago | parent

Its about the whole pipeline. From adding a PDF to listening in the car (with the app).

malfist 4 days ago | parent

Let me guess, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

satvikpendem 4 days ago | parent

Yes, because these days the world has changed since then.

hirako2000 4 days ago | parent

This trend to sell subscription with a price for "credits".

For a wrapper around costly LLM providers.

For a result one could get with voicebox for free.

cj00 4 days ago | parent

How well does it handle pronunciation, especially of things like proper nouns? This has been one of the harder parts I've found. On a financial web site I saw one example where the generated audio pronounced initiates as a noun instead of a verb. It's a subtle difference but can significantly change the meaning if worded wrong.

I was trying to use TTS to regenerate some old audiobooks and getting names pronounced correctly is pretty hard unless the model supports something like SSML.

subless 4 days ago | parent

I love using https://convert.to.it/ for all of my converting needs; everything is client-side in the browser with over 400 file extension options to choose from.

Source: https://github.com/p2r3/convert

MadameMinty 4 days ago | parent

Behold, an audiobook: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v4Iux5ppJe5SbE4TcpV9NQTsY0N...

thirtygeo 3 days ago | parent

Ouch!

ensocode 3 days ago | parent

That was interesting :-D

55555 4 days ago | parent

Please share an example of a two-speaker podcast that it has generated, add support for spoken Thai, and I will pay & use it weekly.

janpmz 4 days ago | parent

Here you go my friend, a two speaker podcast in Thai :)

https://pdftomp3.com/published/player.html?publication_id=6a...

butz 4 days ago | parent

What about license of such output? Won't Google and OpenAI be coming to my door for their share from the sales of "my" audiobooks?

sureMan6 4 days ago | parent

You'll have to read the license agreement for openAI or Google on their tts

Or look into open source tts models with liberal commercial licenses

Generally I'd stay away from the site/project/repo in the OP and just do your own research on this (because the OP site is vibe coded in a sleazy way that's unnecessarily used car salesman-y and doesn't offer anything you couldn't just do better yourself with one codex or chatgpt prompt)

Edit: to be clear there's a lot of different tts providers, they probably all offer tts you can use commercially, you can look at benchmarks for the providers and then the specific TOS

remix2000 4 days ago | parent

If you put no effort into it, then it’s unlikely you can put any royalty claim on it either? But nobody’s gonna pay for it anyway so don’t worry.

trencedamp 4 days ago | parent

I don't know why you would do this when there are free open source solutions out there that do not use credits.

Kwpolska 3 days ago | parent

If you're on a Mac, `say -f book.txt -o book.aiff`, no API keys required.

janpmz 3 days ago | parent

I've updated my video to show the player experience and the quality of the voices:

https://youtu.be/1qiH_SeDyyc

mandeepj 3 days ago | parent

how do you handle diagrams or other visual descriptions from text?

GrayHerring 3 days ago | parent

Can people please get their terminology right, why am I getting clickbaited.

thangalin 3 days ago | parent

KeenLore is my emotive audiobook creator, which I've been working on for the past several months to help me narrate my sci-fi novel. Here's a slightly outdated demo video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAeHgE94rVo

I've since added character ages (child to supercentenarian voices, consistent relative to their base adult voice), crowd chants (2 to 100 people works flawlessly), case sensitivity for character aliases (to help detect quotation attributions), custom phonetics, and English speaking characters can have a variety of accents applied. Will soon have Chatterbox driving the novel's narration. Screenshot:

https://i.ibb.co/GffgfnCL/narrating.png

It's self-hosted, fully local, based on software having permissive licenses and open weights. Runs on a lowly 8GB NVIDIA T1000 (and 96 GB of RAM).

m4rtink 3 days ago | parent

Please don't.

mier 3 days ago | parent

I use my hobby app PageHum to read short to medium articles in devices using MLX and Kokoro instead of. Give it a try if anyone interested in https://github.com/Mieraidihaimu/pagehum (Xcode 27+)

jinjiefan2018 3 days ago | parent

love reading the comments, now have so many choices.

Crystalin 3 days ago | parent

I've created a simple software to perform similar, using LLM for analysis (finding who is speaking, deciding the voices, translating if necessary) and Gemini for the audio (it is impressive they have good quality no matter the language for the same voice)

What is cool is to then make an AI Skill of it. I've done that and I now can ask on my phone to generate a podcast, or a reading of a page, or small audiobook (very long ones takes few hours) that is sent back to me and I can listen while doing another activity

mishutka 3 days ago | parent

Its BYOK, not subscription. And this does not seem to be very robust.

I did something better a while ago, a fully offline webapp:

https://github.com/mstsirkin/bookworm-whisper

my friends are all using it. Better how:

- outputs an apple audio book, for use on mobile

- tracks pages so chapters so you know which page you are

- handles notes, tables

- supports epub and pdf

- keepalive so you can switch tabs while it is processing

Hope this helps.

achalxyz 3 days ago | parent

I generally create an openrouter API key with some predefined credit limit (say 10 USD), put it in a .env file in the folder, and just add a line to the prompt telling Claude Code about the key. Opus 5.5 is then able to select the right model for the job, do the cleaning and conversion, and hand me the final output.