HN user
Founder of Listenly.io
x.com/ivryb
I really didn't intend to be dishonest.
I just wrote a catchy title (which can be a bit misleading, but not dramatically, as all the audiobooks I'm mentioning are really accessible to people; I developed all the infrastructure needed for that), and tried to clarify everything in the post itself.
Exactly how I perceive it
Agreed, I should do this.
Although I still concerned about the costs of maintaining all these MP3s.
For some of the books, it's true; for some, it's not.
I'm really enjoying listening to nonfiction – history, philosophy, biographies.
Thank you for support!
Why do you think it's a lie?
There are 70,000 audiobooks in the catalog, and people can listen to them. If audio is generated on-demand in the background, it does not make them "not-audiobooks", and it does not make my post a lie. "If it looks like a duck..."
It's just a technical implementation detail. And I'm not hiding it; I'm describing it in the post
It is a hobby project, it is crowd-sourced, and I am selling tech services (not subscriptions).
And I don't see any lie there.
1. There are 70,000 audiobooks in the catalog, and people can listen to them. If audio is generated on-demand in the background, it does not make them "not-audiobooks", and it does not make my post a lie.
It's just a technical implementation detail. And I'm not hiding it; I'm describing it in the post. I cannot describe the implementation detail in the short title.
It's just that you decided to believe that it's a lie, saying it very confidently, and taking down the post that was received generally very positively.
2. It's not a subscription, it's one-time purchase of hours.
Come on, what's your problem, man?
I explained what I did in detail. I'm open in the comment section and explained my reasoning regarding the pricing. I've made practically no money off of this project so far.
There is an option to cache, but there is also an option to crowd-source, which makes the price for the first person smaller.
Moreover, if you try to buy an 'hour plan' for $15 and listen to any PG book, you will not be billed for the converted chunk, so the caching works as you'd expect.
Flagging feels so exteremely unfair.
It wouldn't fit into HN's characters limit
You should try listening to some non-fiction, such as history, philosophy, biographies, etc.
It's already great for that purpose.
I checked out the omnivore TTS.
They're using a previous generation of TTS models, which most of the reader apps are using. They're reasonable, cheap, but sound noticeably worse than OpenAI's or 11Labs. I don't like them.
I answerd this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40963194
I like the idea of letting people donate the audio they purchased to the community.
Although I'm scared that I'll have no money.
Seems like some kind of bug on the LemonSqueezy side. It is enabled in the store settings, but I also cannot see it. Will open a ticket.
Right now, it's not working like that.
I was thinking about it.
On the one hand, I want to make money. On the other hand, I understand that making everything available for free would be much more aligned with the Project Gutenberg philosophy.
I left my job, living on the savings, and in the last year listenly made only $400 ~= $35 MRR. Although I was not doing much marketing.
I'm dreaming of it making $1k, $3k, $5k MRR.
Right now, I set the price to be 50% of the API cost, so I would make a profit starting from the 3rd same book purchase.
But maybe I should make it fully social project, get some donations, and treat it as "lead magnet" to monetize something else. I'm open to your suggestions!
Really interesting take!
I really thought that 1.5x playback speed would be the same as 1.5x generation speed. Wow. Looks like I was wrong.
Regarding the subscription — I thought that no subscription was actually a competitive advantage, but now so many people are telling me to do it, that I'm really not sure anymore.
I don't think it's high quality, tbh
Much less enjoyable than with OpenAI TTS.
I don't think that they contradict.
Maybe AI-generated books should also be a part of Librivox.
I tried to listen to some, but the quality of narration was bad.
Well, someone has to pay for API calls :D
I was thinking about launching a Kickstarter campaign and making the whole library free for everyone. But I need more feedback. I don't know if it's viable.
In general, it is not great for fiction right now, needs a lot of improvement But for history/philosophy/science books its great.
And yeah, OpenAI's model is bad for non-English languages. At least, for now...
In this particular case, it's just that the blog post is basically just a link: https://paulgraham.com/lwba.html
Their TTS model is worse than OpenAI's though
This is very cool!
I think you should try OpenAI's voices for characters too. They're really good at catching the emotions. They even can scream! https://x.com/ivryb/status/1780210661189992877
Holy sh*t, nope, didn't know it
I'm postponing the development of the voice selector for like 3 months already. Something more important is always popping up xD
You're right about the popular books, but the long-tail of not-so-popular ones doesn't have a human audio version, and probably will never have.
Plus, sometimes available human narrations are so bad that you really would like to listen to an AI one (I've experienced it with Churchill's audiobooks on Audible).
I don't know if it will work. It felt like it should work, at least for pSEO.
I got my first two audiobook purchases two weeks after I submitted the sitemap to Google. It was some romantic novels. But now it's flatlined again.
Will see...
Yeah, I think it should be possible technically. Put all the chapters through LLM and ask it to add markup for different characters/voices.
Right now, my paid users are listening mostly to non-fiction, so it seems like they don't need it.
But this whole Project Gutenberg saga is kinda diluting everything, and I need to think which users/market to focus on.
Will see :)
Right now, I'm splitting all the text into 4,000-character chunks (OpenAI TTS limitation), and converting them into audio "on-demand".
When it's like 1-2 minutes before the end of the current chunk — I'm starting to generate the next one, for a seamless transition.
One chunk is taking about 30-40 seconds to generate (OpenAI API is 20-30s, Azure OpenAI API is ~40s).
I was planning to convert the whole book (just by queuing and parallelizing the requests) and concatenate it into a single MP3 (or an MP3 for each chapter), but it's not ready yet.