Building a TTS Tool for My Friend in One Hour

The Ask

My friend asked if there was a service that could read academic papers aloud - not like NotebookLM which creates podcast-style summaries, but something that would actually read the original text. She wanted to listen to papers like audiobooks when her eyes got tired.

I didn't know of such a service, but since I'm familiar with Microsoft Azure Language Services, I offered to help: "Send me the paper and I'll make mp3 for you."

The Reality Check

I thought this would be simple:

1. Extract text from PDF using Claude/ChatGPT/Grok
2. Run it through Azure TTS (Text to Speech)
3. Done!

Wrong. Academic PDFs are messy. Extract text and you get dozens of co-author names, chart numbers, table data, footnotes - everything my friend didn't want to hear.

I tried asking different AIs to extract only title, abstract, and main content:

• Claude Sonnet: Failed
• Grok: Failed with errors
• Claude Opus: Success

Turns out extracting clean content from academic PDFs is harder than expected.

From Manual to Automated

I generated the MP3 using Azure TTS and made a tutorial video. But a week later, my friend was still hunting for paid PDF-to-speech services.

That's when I realized: I might not know the perfect PDF-to-text AI, but I can definitely build a basic TTS web app.

So I coded one with Claude Sonnet, built it in Next.js, deployed on Vercel, and shared it.

This is why I love being able to code!!!

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Visit my github blog to read more
https://battlelolo.github.io/