Kokoro read 'Chapter IV' as 'Chapter Roman Four'. So I gave it a proofreader with ears.
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle What I Built An indie author with fifteen novels has fifteen audiobooks they will probably never make. A human narrator costs roughly $200 to $400 per finished hour, so a ten-hour novel is a few thousand dollars, before anyone knows whether the audiobook will sell. Multiply by a backlist and the answer is "not…
The indie author has created a tool called Backlist that allows them to narrate their own audiobooks using an open-weight voice model named Kokoro, and proof-listen those audiobooks using the open-weight speech recognizer Whisper. This eliminates the need for a human narrator and the costly proof-listening process. Users can upload a chapter, and Kokoro will narrate it in the browser while Whisper listens to each line and flags any errors.
The user can then review and correct these flagged lines, after which they can download the mastered chapter file ready for distribution. The tool works entirely on the user's laptop, requiring no additional setup or backend infrastructure, making it a cost-effective solution for self-published authors with a backlist of audiobooks to produce.
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