Show HN: Free audiobooks with synchronized text for language learning

floo

hey HN! this is my attempt at language learning with audiobooks. it synchronizes text to speech, and shows translations. the audiobooks themselves are all public domain. got all of the audio alignment, translation, and asset generation working on my gaming computer. pretty happy with the pipeline, except for the sometimes subpar translations. if anyone is interested in the details I am happy to write them up! if you are into language learning, I would love to hear if this could be useful to you!

aanet

This is fantastic! I've been meaning to learn Spanish, and this looks super useful. Would love to learn more about your pipeline [selfishly, I was looking to build (free) ebooks -> audio for my own purposes as a side project] What were the most challenging aspects? What assumptions failed / held true? Any experiences to share? Thx

_popeye

This is great! More beginner level stories would be much appreciated.

nbcesar

Looks great - Exactly what I’m looking for. Could we get different dialects? For Spanish, I would love to be able to select a country for the audio. At least a Latin American version to start. Thanks for sharing.

Meleagris

For those interested in doing this themselves, there’s some great existing software to create EPUB3 files with the audiobook aligned with text. https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/ https://codeberg.org/richwaters/StoryAlign