I built a free and opensource Japanese audiobook reader that highlights words as they are recited, spotify style
I've been learning japanese for a year mostly watching tv shows with no reading abilities lol. I've grown to native level conversational but can't read. In january, i decided to change that. I then started learning Kanji using RTK. In march, I finished RTK and started reading audiobooks. but as i read, i get lost multiple time (#short attention span). But then i realized that while listening to Yuyu's podcast on spotify and reading the transcript, I never get lost cos it highlights what's currently being said. So I started building that for audiobooks.
The way it works is simple:
you upload an audio book and a pdf. then it matches each word to a timeframe in the audio. If you only have the audio book mp3, you can also upload that and it'll generate the text matching that audio. but if you only have a pdf, it won't generate audio for it (native voice is important!). Given that the app is in such an early stage, it doesn’t work well with heavy book/audio files. To avoid any issues, I’ve set the max audio size at 20mb and PDF at 10mb. there's already a book in there so you can try it out.
check it here: ondoku-khaki.vercel.app
There are some cosmetic features just to help in reading like tap word for dictionary lookup, send to anki, long-press words, intensive mode etc, but the main thing im after is the word-level karaoke highlighting. i'd love some feedback