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Show HN: Turn websites into audio locally in the browser with WebGPU

By hallh 2 min read 5 views 0 comments

I wanted a simple way to listen to articles on the go and found elevenreader. While I think the voices they have are great, I didn't want to bother with an account, a subscription, and yet another service interested in my content habits.I thought that TTS models and runtimes surely must have reached a point where they can run effectively on a mobile device with WebGPU. Maybe a fully local webapp could be feasible?Shortly after, I heard about Phonon here on HN and was motivated to spend a weekend with Claude and see what we could come up with :)The result is:- A fully local Audiobook/TTS webapp
- An optimised Phonon runtime reaching ~4x increase in speed on WebGPU and CPU compared to stock Phonon
- Streaming, so the audio starts quickly and continues to generate uninterrupted while the phone is locked
- Library with an optional "auto-download" feature, so you can pre-render articles to be listened to later
- Fully serverless and local, the bundle is hosted in Cloudflare workers, no backend, no database, no user accounts, no tracking. Only piece of backend logic is a simple proxy to use as fallback for fetching URLs that the browser is unable to fetch b/c of CORSDepending on your OS…

Hacker News (Newest) Original story · storytella.io
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