2026-02-15
I love audiobooks. They give me access to books when a I cannot or do not want to read in the conventional way. Sometimes my eyes are too tired, typically after work. I often do things that require my eyes or hands but not much attention. If I am not in the mood to listen to music, or just sit and let my mind empty out, an audiobook is the perfect thing. Unfortunately, at time of writing, they only exist for very mainstream, very popular texts. For example, you can seemingly find every ghost-written celebrity autobiography in audiobook form. Major history works on widely-studied events are often missing.
For the last several years, it has been possible to take a scanned PDF of a book and convert it into an audiobook, in a purely automated way. The PDF can be run through OCR software to get an accurate plain text copy of the book's contents. This can be fed into voice generation software to get a complete audiobook. The quality of the narration is inferior to a professional voice actor and it probably will remain this way for years to come. It is comparable to an amateur human narrator. This is impressive, more than good enough for me and millions of others to enjoy these audiobooks.
People are already machine-voicing books on an ad hoc basis. They post their work to various video streaming websites. However, it is still a cottage industry. It is kind of people to work for voluntary donations in this way, but the process should not even require work by human beings. From a purely technical perspective, we should have a program that takes a PDF, lets you choose a voice, then spits out an audio file.
There is a business here. If you are in a position to make it a reality, maybe you want to go for it. I am taking care of a few things so cannot pursue this myself.