All 100 ideasReading and news
#69 of 100 · Reading and news
Whispersync for any book
Switch between reading an ebook or article and listening to it, via a matched audiobook or natural text-to-speech, without losing their place.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay10%
- Want it local or private20%
- Object to subscriptions0%
- Want it open source or self-hosted10%
- Want AI to do it40%
Share of the 10 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for6 Show HN launches do this job, and 3 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- An open-source, self-hostable synced narration platform for ebooks2023 · 338 pts
- PDF to Podcast – Convert Any PDF into a Podcast Episode2024 · 118 pts
- Read while you listen to your Audiobooks2026 · 6 pts
- A beautiful and local-first PDF reader for studying dense things2026 · 6 pts
- Python Read Along2022 · 2 pts
- LazyReader – Read ebooks and stream audiobooks directly from your cloud2026 · 1 pts
Instead of: Whispersync, Kindle, Audible, Calibre
The idea, as matched
A tool that keeps an ebook or article and its audio version in sync, like Whispersync for any book, podcast or blog post, or generates natural-sounding text-to-speech so you can switch between reading and listening.
Jev first matched 11 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 10 of 11.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Half want sync, half just want good TTS.
- Oct 2024Wants an app that syncs reading progress between an ebook and an audiobook not bought from Amazon. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Offline audiobook from any format with one CLI command”
- May 2024Wants Whispersync-style switching between text and narration, e.g. syncing Librivox audio with Gutenberg epubs, with better audio quality. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Affordable text-to-speech for long-form content”
- Jan 2024Wants a Whispersync-like tool for podcasts and blog posts, with transcripts, highlighting, read mode and self-hosting. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Whispersync for Podcasts/Blogposts?”
- Dec 2023Wants an HN audio service that reads titles one at a time and highlights the one just heard. Read it: a comment in “Spotify's push into audiobooks sparks concern among authors”
- May 2022Wants human-quality text-to-speech for articles and books and would gladly pay. Read it: a comment in “NaturalSpeech: End-to-end text to speech synthesis with human-level quality”
- Mar 2021Wants an easier way to turn text books into audiobooks using good read-aloud voices. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Do you read books regularly? Fiction or nonfiction?”
- Feb 2021Wants an app that converts RSS feeds, or at least news titles, into audio. Read it: a comment in “I Still Use RSS”
- Sep 2020Wants a product that uses speech-to-text to keep an audiobook and its matching ebook in sync. Read it: a comment in “Cozy is a modern audiobook player for Linux”
- Apr 2017Wants natural-sounding text-to-speech to listen to articles during commutes. Read it: a comment in “Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)”
- Dec 2010Wants a way to listen to blog articles while driving, using a bookmarklet on the phone. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Rate my Webapp: castmyclips.com”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.