Show HN: Use your OpenAI subscription to create audiobooks

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 Here's a slightly outdated demo video: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).

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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...

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

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.

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!

Please don't.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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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?