Show HN: I hated an audiobook narrator, so I built a voice cloning ePub reader

github.com/jarodise

1 point

jarodise

4 months ago

I was listening to Yuval Harari's "Nexus" earlier this year. Great book, terrible narrator (for me).

I kept wishing it was Scott Brick(one of my favorite narrators) instead.

That frustration turned into ClonEpub - a desktop app that converts EPUBs to audiobooks using voice cloning.

Upload a 10-30 second sample of any voice, and it reads your book in that voice.

It runs entirely locally on CPU. My M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM handles it fine. Generated an audiobook of Animal Farm in about 100 minutes.

Why local? No API costs. And honestly, if I want to clone Scott Brick's voice for my own listening pleasure, that's between me and my headphones.

Built with Electron + Python, powered by @kyutai_labs's excellent Pocket TTS (100M params, ~240MB).

Try it out if you are an audiobook lover like me. :)

Note: the tool only supports English book generation at the moment due to restrictions of the TTS model used, and I only made the distribution for Mac Apple Silicon users, but theoretically it should work on all machines with a CPU, and since it's 100% open source, you can make your own distribution.