I also wanted the following thing to achieve, instead of creating a new topic, let me ask this here itself :
How to use PDF books as audiobooks
I had used only the Reader by ElevenLabs to read my PDF (or other formats) books I have locally on my system for a some time now. For reading Web Articles, I use extensions like NaturalReader. But I actually enjoy reading books from my Windows PC and was searching for a desktop application for the same. I liked the way Reader by ElevenLabs works, but it has few downsides which I don’t like, such as, Eleven labs don’t work without internet, it uploads my PDFs in their cloud.
To give a summary of what I want in the application are :
- The application interface should be similar to Xodo. I am not looking for any editing feature for the PDF and all, the only reason I mention Xodo was because, it has the features like showing all the books in a nice gallery format with thumbnail, it shows progress of the book how much I have read and I can surf through a specific folder to see all the PDF or other format books I have offline on my PC. Xodo has a speed reader feature, but for that I am required to select the text I want to read, and also it lacks features such as auto-scrolling, highlighting the words while reading, etc. These are the reasons I am searching for a different desktop application.
- The reader should have functionalities similar to Reader by ElevenLabs android app. That is, all the control buttons, I should be able to pause and come back to the application and continue from the last checkpoint.
- The application should allow me to use the TTS voice engine from my pc instead of using an online service, so the app should work in offline mode.
- Along with other features like controlling the speech speed, auto scrolling, highlighting the text while reading, etc.
Would love to know if there is already a desktop application like this (otherwise, I guess I will have to start building my own plugin inside Obsidian, which will take some time.)