Automating Immersive Reading

This is how I proofread. I play a screen reader while I read my work. The brain does some autocorrecting that you don’t even notice and occasionally skips over a typo when you read it without the audio.

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

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?

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