Make Your Own Audiobooks

Written 2 days ago

Or, How to turn any text into audio files

I am fond of reading light novels. So much so, that I once wrote a script that pulls chapters from any story I’m currently inhaling from RoyalRoad, which is a website for sharing the same, so I can read when I’m on the go.

I have a couple of variations of said script (in typescript and go); however, both essentially do the same thing: Get the story from the website into a local txt file.

I was okay with this setup for a while, until I realized I couldn’t actually “read” them while driving (or any activity where I was otherwise busy).

I’ve tried several options like using the built-in tts (MacOS’s say command, or Android’s accessibility) to websites that proffer to convert text to speech but I was always let down either by the robotic read-back, the pricing, the word-count, or some other limitations that I couldn’t work around reliably.

And yet, I may have found a solution. Recently, I came across something called kokoro-tts. I finagled with the source for a bit but the easiest way to get it on your system (if have uv installed) is:

uv tool install kokoro-tts

It also requires a couple of helper files that you could download here:

How you set it up can vary, but here’s what I did:

  1. Move both files into ~/.local/share/kokoro-tts/ folder (so it aligns with my .dotfiles repository structure)
  2. Add a shell function in your shell config (my .aliases) to link to said files like so:
# Usage: tts input.txt --> output.wav
tts() {
  kokoro-tts $1 "$(basename "$1" .txt).wav" \
    --model ~/.local/share/kokoro-tts/kokoro-v1.0.onnx \
    --voices ~/.local/share/kokoro-tts/voices-v1.0.bin \
    --voice af_heart
}

And that’s it! To test, try this:

echo "Hello, this is a tts voice test" > test-file.txt && tts test-file.txt

It should output a test-file.wav - an audio file that you can play!

So… audio-books?

Yes yes, I’m getting there. Remember how I mentioned I built scrapers to pull the story that I’m reading?

Ah, I see you already connected the dots!

Regardless, here’s a snapshot of how I turn a story from RoyalRoad into an audiobook I can play whilst driving:

go run scrape.go https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/17731/i-never-wanted-you-dead/chapter/209061/i-never-wanted-you-dead && tts story.txt

Yes, that’s all it takes (after you’ve got the rest of the plumbing down, of course).

Besides, you don’t need my scraper to get the text down. There are websites like webpage-content-extractor (just as an example) to turn a website’s content into text files, and then feed them to the tts.

And there you have it - your own audiobooks (with a lovely voice to boot!). Have fun!

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