HN user
This is awesome. People are already talking about use of local models for heavy tasks like llm inference. TTS is very much possible on device without any high end gpu. That's why Ive been working integrating it into a free reader web app with some features more than just getting audio from a text.
if the doesn't leave my phone why is it a subscription?
For the Audio part, I suggest https://desktop.with.audio
I'm working on a new compontent for viewing PDFs in original format and structure but show text highlighting while a specific piece of the PDF is being played in the TTS engine. This for my app (https://with.audio). Which already supports PDF parsing and TTS of PDF files. WithAudio currently converts the input PDF to Markdown and performs TTS and synchronized text highlighting on the Markdown content. I want to do this on the original rendered PDF content itself.
Initial results are promosing Extracting the text and figuring out which lines belong to the same paragraph and then try to map those to the original positions in the PDF...
this is not good but the point is this can be improved much easier than improving human accidents rate. Both are very difficult problems, but one is certainly harder.
When it comes to cost rebuilding, we can't compare the software engineering with other industries(like cards or buildings). I think this makes it much more iterative compared to them. Living in North America, if feel like 99% of aparatments and houses can be grouped into 5-10 floor plans. I think thats because when you are designing a new building or house you really can't do much risk. You do what has already worked. Software also have trends, but they change so often. You also can't do A/B testing or targeting or measure every single interaction potential customer has with your product. The nature of building "Software" really brings so many options to the table which increases the number of iterations by order of magnitude.
This is amazing. The audio feels very natural and it's fairly good at handling complext text to speech tasks. I've been working on WithAudio (https://with.audio). Currently it only uses Kokoros. I need to test this a bit more but I might actually add it to the app. It's too good to be ignored.
A one time payment app - interesting (I'm also working on something with similar moneytization solution). How are things going? I'd love to know the experience of another solopreneur, what stack are you using? I wonder - What are you using to parse PDFs and extract the text? I found that is a nightmare when was doing something similar for WithAudio (my app). - Are you just extracting the text or you are doing any post processing to identify which lines belong to the same paragraph or not?
My project is WithAudio and is gonna be WithAudio for a while. Its a text to speech reader. Initially I decided to generate pargraph by paragaph. But that was not a great call as users sometimes might have to wait for the whole paragraph to be ready before they can listen. Now I'm working on changing it to sentence by sentence. I think that + adding 2 new languages would take most of my January's budgeted time.
As its obvious in my profile, WithAudio is my personal project that started in 2025. Starting Q3 I decided to plan it quarterly and write a summary every month.
This was for Q3: https://blog.with.audio/posts/summer-2025-withaudio-updates
Looking at an empty screen is difficult for me, so I just did `git log --pretty=oneline --since="3 months ago" and gave the result to Claud and a reference to the other blog post to get a starting point. Then I read the whole thing 3 times and edited that. So AI is used in writing this but this is not written by AI.
Happy New Year!
2025 I'm proud of my 2025. I lost weight with a slow pace. I launched one of my projects and built on top of it and I'm currently at 99 items sold. Hopefull it will get to 100 by end of the year. Not gonna lie, bad stuff happened too, but I'm not gonna focus on those.
2026 If everything goes as planned, I'm hoping to see my my mother and brother after 4 years. I want live a bit healthier, and I want to grow the same side project. I really hope I scroll less shitty content.
This is the community I feel safe the most in and really helps me keep going everyday.
Looks interesting, I spent some time on text to speech in browser this year. You might find it interesting. https://desktop.with.audio/reader
Hey! this looks cool. I'm curious how it works, can you share more? you said it's not a subscription and it's "pay for what you use". So hows the pricing work? Do you charge me or I'll bring an API key to some other TTS provider?
One time payment text to speech reader application for Mac and Windows. Not a subscription because it runs 100% on your device!
I've been doing this in most of 2025 in my free time. It went way way better than I thought in 2025 and I'm gonna focus more on this in 2026 as well. I've actually sold licenses and I'm gonna try to find out new ways to promote it. It recently had a moment on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1pseqsy/thank_you_...
With all the AI hype lately, if a product like that actually existed, you would’ve heard about it by now.
- "Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)"
- My First Million (www.mfmpod.com). I just don't know why, but for some reason I stopped listening to them in the past 2 months, but rest of the year I was really enjoying their content. Even older ones.
- Pivot and Prof G, mostly because of Scott Galloway. I really like him.
- Under The Influence with Terry O'Reilly. Amazingly good. Very fun to listen to and almost always brings joy and help me learn something new.
- All In, can't say I'm still enjoying this. It's way too political these days. But it's still something I listen to occasionally. When I listen I usually end up skipping half of the content to find something I like.
Came here to say this! Complex Systems is not the best for me but it's for sure the new content I found this year. I find myself listening and sometimes pausing to search to learn more about what he is talking about.
Still WithAudio https://desktop.with.audio . It's getting some attention and has actually sold licences!
Someone asked for a free license in exchange of detailed private review and bug reports. They have reported more than 10 bugs so far. I'm working on some of them right now.
WithAudio is a one time payment text to speech reader app. It's one time payment because it has no server and no recurring cost! A nice side effect of this is it's 100% private.
Because I can’t debug it and can’t understand it!
Saw this a few days ago, it was an interesting. I liked the part about people being wrong about how much they know about something but the video title and the incident seems like bad luck or bad timing as it is a standalone issue. The same mistake could have easy been a very success story in another year and another country with the same amount of knowledge and confidence about the knowledge.
Subscriptions really opened so many options. A kid can play around an enterprise software for a couple of months with a reasonable price. But not everything needs to be a subscription. It truly bugs me. We own very powerful laptops and desktops these days. Usually way more powerful than what these softwares run on. It’s a painful experience to pay for both of them, the laptop and unnecessary subscriptions.
https://blog.with.audio/posts/why-everything-doesnt-have-to-...
almost for any project I work on keep reminding myself os what I read somwhere:
90% of the project takes 90% of the time and the other 10% of the project takes another 90% of the time.
If I was writing this I wouldn't put the "Has smart, humble coworker(s)." right there on top. I there is no reasonable solution for that (s) in this case but stil...
Make it required to see AI generated PRs and README updates
yeah. We can see how controversial this is by looking at the comment count
I really like to know if other stuff that make things easy would have felt the same to fols who have been doing computer programming for the past 30 years if they were presented to them with a similar speed.
I do a lot of desktop screen-reader and pdf/doc/epub/etc text to speech every single day.
I've been working a product called WithAudio (https://with.audio). Are you open to me reaching out and give a free license so you can use it and let me know what you think ? I should say it only supports Windows and Mac(arm). I'm looking for people who have used similar products to get their feedback.
This is what I think AI thrive at. But I'm not sure if its real value or not. We all have repos with fairly clean git history and repos with as the author said "fixes" and "updates". If there was any value in having a clean history in such repos it would have already been clean.
I'm still working on WithAudio (https://desktop.with.audio). A one time payment Text To Speech Desktop App. Because I think everything doesn't have to be a subscription.
In October I finished the PDF parser. It was a big challenge extracting PDF contect with correct paragraph breaks on user's computer locally. I'm gonna write about this soon.
Now I'm working on a web extension that talks to the app that run locally on your system so you can use WithAudio in your browser with very good performance, 100% local and private.
I the k in cases like this we (researchers) see what their looking for to see.