5 ms·
Automating Immersive Reading
- aaron695 1mo ago[dead]
- smoores 1mo agoI took a week of from work recently to reimplement Storyteller's forced alignment algorithm. Storyteller[1] is an open source, self hosted platform for creating, managing, and reading/listening to "readaloud" books — books that have audiobook narration built in and can highlight each sentence (and/or word, with this new algorithm!) as it's read aloud. Forced alignment is the process of determining where each piece of text starts and ends in the audiobook. Anyway, I am really pleased with how the new algorithm turned out! Hopefully someone else finds it interesting as well. [1] https://storyteller-platform.dev https://storyteller-platform.dev
- orsenthil 1mo agoThis is excellent! I wanted this. I had noticed that Kindle had limited feature like this for certain books that support audiobooks. I had tried this style of reading with audiobook and ebook without a any automated sync, but hadn't pursued it. This looks cool. :)
- zackify 1mo agoThis is great. Recently got an xteink x3 and jailbroke my kindle, making custom stuff for it. I couldn't find it exactly in the docs. Sorry if I missed it. If you align these and then pull onto koreader via opds or other way, will audio work over Bluetooth there too? Along with the highlighting.
- smoores 1mo agoYou can use a KOReader plugin, https://github.com/stradichenko/audiobook.koplugin https://github.com/stradichenko/audiobook.koplugin, which has work-in-progress support for Media Overlays (the EPUB spec that Storyteller uses for readaloud)!
- zackify 1mo agoWow I didn't even think about just using on device AI. I'm going to set this one up and try it with kokoro which has the most natural for small size that I've seen. Wonder if the paperwhite 12th Gen can handle it. And also setup the main repo for when I have the real audio book. Thanks!
- leobg 1mo agoI tried running Kokoro on my iPhone XS (several years old), and it was slower than real-time. So, i wouldn’t expect it to be usable on a Kindle. But if you find a solution, please let me know.
- deivid 1mo agoKokoro can be hacked a bit (see script https://github.com/DavidVentura/translator-rs/blob/master/scripts/kokoro_mnn/rebuild_best_mnn.sh https://github.com/DavidVentura/translator-rs/blob/master/sc... ) which makes it about 3x faster. My phone went from slightly slower than realtime to very comfortable (also lower latency on first utterance!)
- leobg 1mo ago
- zackify 1mo agoAny plans to offer a way to generate audio books on demand. like if i set kokoro, a book auto imports, it can make the file for me for the whole book after some time of local gpu work?
- chrisweekly 1mo agoCool! S an avid reader, Whispersync is one of the things that keeps me paying Amazon/Audible. Competition and viable OSS alternatives would be great!
- smoores 1mo agoI'll post again when we release the v3 apps — even in alpha, they're really awesome, I think they blow the Kindle app out of the water!
- mobeets 1mo agoThis is really impressive! One thing I’ve often wanted is a way to listen to an ebook (say, while cooking), and then later be able to sit down and read from where I left off. This essentially requires the same functionality that Storyteller offers (syncing progress through an ebook and audiobook), though arguably overkill for this use case (since I could handle a more coarse alignment). In any case, is this something Storyteller would be good for? Or are there other tools for the job?
- smoores 1mo agoThat is actually the exact use case that I originally built Storyteller for! I wanted to listen to my books on long runs, and then switch to reading when I got back. The Storyteller mobile apps have great support for this, I think. They have fully fledged audiobook players and ebook readers, and you can switch between the two with one tap. And then of course you can also double tap on a sentence and start playing from there, with the app highlighting the currently read sentence.
- Xerox9213 1mo agoWhat about reading on a koreader? Is bookbridge still the best bet?
- smoores 1mo agoThere are two koreader plugins: 1. StorytellerSync (https://github.com/Sirozha1337/storytellersync.koplugin https://github.com/Sirozha1337/storytellersync.koplugin), which syncs your KOReader progress directly to your Storyteller server 2. Audiobook (https://github.com/stradichenko/audiobook.koplugin https://github.com/stradichenko/audiobook.koplugin), which has a WIP media overlay implementation that works with Storyteller readalouds
- tefkah 1mo agoi think smoores response got flagged for some reason, but there’s a StorytellerSync plugin https://github.com/Sirozha1337/storytellersync.koplugin https://github.com/Sirozha1337/storytellersync.koplugin
- usern20260720 1mo agoI generated an immersive reading for Athenaze in a few afternoons with Claude
- smoores 1mo ago... Okay!
- cainxinth 1mo agoThis is how I proofread. I play a screen reader while I read my work. The brain does some autocorrecting that you don’t even notice and occasionally skips over a typo when you read it without the audio.
- thelisu 1mo agoThis highlights the core reason why I don't like audiobooks, podcasts, or even movies, compared to reading: it's too slow. Looking at the example, I read two or three times as fast as the audio goes. What I would need is the opposite: some eye-tracking software that plays the audio at the point I am reading. I don't know if it would be any useful though, as it would be very sped-up, but maybe it would increase "immersion" nevertheless.
- smoores 1mo agoAlmost everyone who uses the readaloud features in Storyteller speeds up the audio playback quite a bit, often 2-3x, so that it matches their reading speed better. The Storyteller apps let you set different playback speeds for pure audio playback vs readaloud, since being able to see the text usually makes it easier to listen faster! I supposed I should add: it's also, obviously, fine if this just isn't for you! Lots of people get a lot of value out of audiobooks (e.g., I really like to listen to audiobooks in the car or while running), but like to switch to reading when it's an option. And lots of people find readaloud super valuable, whether because they have a print disability or neurodivergence that makes reading challenging, or just because they like the experience of being read to. But lots of people are in neither of those groups!
- altmanaltman 1mo agoI read very fast and I noticed that after a certain point, it helps to not have the inner voice. Instead its more like I see a bunch of text and I understand it instead of going word by word. I don't think its possible to do this with audio.
- trunch 1mo agodo you normally have an inner voice and just suppress it when reading quickly? or not have one at all? wondering as I lack one so curious if it's also worth trying to develop it in the other direction
- altmanaltman 1mo ago
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- lstodd 1mo agoIf that's about reading why do I need to zoom to 140 in FF to just begin reading?
- smoores 1mo agoHm, I don't know what you're referring to. Is the text too small for you? I wrote the blog post on FF for Linux and FF for Android, and I didn't need to zoom in to review it, though some of the graphics do definitely end up with pretty small text on mobile.
- lstodd 1mo agoxubuntu, 2x iiyama IVM610F those are 24" 1920x1200, firefox latest. For some reason when I open hn it's readable. When I open your site it's.. not.
- smoores 1mo agoYou gotta give me more than that haha. It's not readable in what way?
- lstodd 1mo agoOkay. It is a small font within a small column which wastes like 60+% space of a screen, and I use tabs, eh? Tabs are not windows, I will not resize my browser just because of one single tab. This is a horizontal 24" 1920x1200, not a fucking phone. so I respectfully plead for you and everyone else to forget those ridiculous horizontal margins.
- nottorp 1mo agoI thought reading becomes immersive if you like the book...
- smoores 1mo agoSure! Some people have print disabilities like dyslexia and neurodivergence that makes reading text for an entire novel-length book challenging. Other people are perfectly competent print readers, but find that they enjoy having their book read to them. Audiobooks are their own art form, and it's nice to be able to enjoy them alongside text. "Immersive reading" seems to be the industry term for this feature — I used it here because I though it was most likely to be recognized by a wide audience. Personally, and within the Storyteller ecosystem, I call it "readaloud," which I think is at least a little bit more useful of a phrase.
- nottorp 1mo agoWell I'm afraid it reminds me of newspeak.
- orphereus 1mo agoWhat is the purpose of this outside people with disabilities? Why do you need word highlighting, it's like those TikToks and IG reels where they show one word at a time to keep you hooked. Surely, if you need this to read a book (again, besides any disabilities), you should stop your current habits.
- smoores 1mo agoWell, first of all, lots of people specifically do use this because they have print disabilities or neurodivergence that makes it challenging to read long stretches of text. Also, disability isn't binary? Some people have an easier time reading text than others — is your argument that books should remain less accessible to those people for whom it's harder because you don't personally feel like they should need it? And then there are _lots_ of people that just enjoy reading this way. Audiobook production is its own art form, and many people like experiencing the text and the audio together. For some people it helps them focus in a noisy environment, for some people they find they can read faster with the narration, and some people just enjoy it. Every single time I post about Storyteller, there are multiple people in the comments insisting that this shouldn't exist because no one should ever consume books differently from how they do. I don't understand it, honestly. If you don't want to read books this way, that's totally fine! You can even still use Storyteller — it works great with plain EPUBs. Why the need to make others feel bad for the way they engage with stories? The world is a better place if more people read more books — discouraging people from reading books in the way that feels pleasant and accessible to them makes the world worse. I think if you feel compelled to instruct people you don't know to "stop their current habits" because you don't personally understand their needs or wants, perhaps you should reconsider your current habits, yourself.
- yorwba 1mo agoIt's helpful for learning a foreign language to read a text while simultaneously listening to it. But when you're not very good at the language yet, you'll likely often fall behind. Word highlighting makes it easy to get back on track. I assume people just learning to read their first language would similarly benefit.
- tcoff91 1mo ago
- SamBam 1mo agoI'm curious whether individual-word highlighting is best for people with reading disabilities, or a broad, whole-sentence highlighting might actually be preferable. When I'm reading my eye is jumping back and forth across the sentence. The demo made this abundantly clear -- it was actually very hard to just track the highlighted word. Just using the fact that I consider myself a very good reader as an example, I wonder whether there are advantages to the eye being free to skip back and forth across a sentence. I assume it might be as simple as a user-preference toggle, since you're already highlighting the sentence. You could also try UIs where the highlighting was more "spread out," focused on the word being said but bleeding into the other words on either side (maybe up until the hard stop of the sentence boundary) to lead the eye toward it. I'm imagining something like the red-blue text color of the BeeLine editor.
- smoores 1mo agoMy guess is, like many accessibility tools, it will vary by person! The Storyteller apps don't actually support this multi-level granularity demostrated in the demo here — until this iteration of the alignment algorithm, the timing wasn't good enough for word-level highlighting. So currently we only do sentence-level highlighting. When we do roll out multi-level granularity, it will indeed be something that you can configure yourself, including how each level is indicated (e.g., you might want to set a background color on the sentence and underling the word) and whether a each level is indicated at all! The "spread out" highlighting is a really neat idea, I don't think I've heard that suggestion before!
- justinhunt 1mo agoThis is very interesting. I do something related: matching student oral reading transcripts back against the text they were assigned to read.Students will misread then re-read a sentence, skip sentences, skip paragraphs etc. I think its similar because we both seek to assign audio time stamps to sentences and words. But I wonder why your forced alignment algorithm is so heavy duty. (My head started to spin at CTC emissions. ) Probably yours is just way more thorough than mine, My simplistic approach would have been to transcribe the audio. And then run a differencing script chapter by chapter matching the book text with the audio transcript. And then do something similar intra chapter to get sentence and word level time stamps.
- smoores 1mo agoOh, cool! Yeah that seems like a good application. The current Storyteller alignment algorithm actually does do just that! We use Whisper to transcribe the audio to text, and then use error-align[1] to align on the text. There are a few disadvantages to this approach: 1. Whisper only supports ~25 languages, and only about 10 of those very well. We want to support more languages, and Massively Multilingual Speech supports "1000+" 2. Whisper's timing outputs are not very good. We want to do word-level highlighting, like in the demo at the top of the post, but in order for that to be a good user experience, those timings need to be very precise. Much easier to do that with CTC! CTC Viterbi is the tried and true forced alignment algorithm for good reason. It's not really that it's heavier duty than running Whisper and aligning on the output. Rather, it's like you stop Whisper early, before it does the final step of actually producing text, and step in and say: take the data you just calculated and use it to produce _this_ text, specifically. And then, since it produced _your_ text, you don't have to do anything else, you just use the timestamps directly. The only reason Storyteller never used it in the past is because I couldn't come up with a good way to do the boundary search I describe in this post! This is super important for books in a way that it may not be for your oral reading transcript use case, because chapters can be (and often are) out of order between the ebook and audiobook. But once I worked out the n-gram RANSAC approach, it became much more tenable. [1]: https://github.com/corticph/error-align https://github.com/corticph/error-align
- 1mo ago
- WrexyBalls 1mo ago[dead]