Automating Immersive Reading

smoores•about 3 hours ago

I 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

orsenthil•about 1 hour ago

This 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. :)

smoores•about 1 hour ago

Thanks! We're improving it all the time — we're working on big new releases ("v3") for the web app and mobile apps. There's a Discord server linked in the docs if you ever need any help out want to chat!

mobeets•about 1 hour ago

This 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?

tcoff91•about 1 hour ago

Storyteller works great for this. It even syncs your position across devices. So when I really want to settle in to read, I go ahead and switch from my iPhone where I was listening to my Boox e-ink reader which syncs right to where I left off.

smoores•about 1 hour ago

That 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•about 1 hour ago

What about reading on a koreader? Is bookbridge still the best bet?

tefkah•less than a minute ago

i think smoores response got flagged for some reason, but there’s a StorytellerSync plugin https://github.com/Sirozha1337/storytellersync.koplugin

usern20260720•33 minutes ago

I generated an immersive reading for Athenaze in a few afternoons with Claude

smoores•28 minutes ago

... Okay!

Automating Immersive Reading

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