The latest articles on DEV Community by Youla Lee (@battlelolo). https://dev.to/battlelolo https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3455352%2F2330c31c-03ff-4463-b90a-107bebd36394.png https://dev.to/battlelolo en Youla Lee Sun, 24 Aug 2025 03:34:54 +0000 https://dev.to/battlelolo/building-a-tts-tool-for-my-friend-in-one-hour-k6i https://dev.to/battlelolo/building-a-tts-tool-for-my-friend-in-one-hour-k6i <h1> Building a TTS Tool for My Friend in One Hour </h1> <p><a href="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fk3ud1x6nymg5ji91yw2q.png" class="article-body-image-wrapper"><img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fk3ud1x6nymg5ji91yw2q.png" alt=" " width="756" height="644"></a></p> <h2> The Ask </h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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."</p> <h2> The Reality Check </h2> <p>I thought this would be simple:</p> <ol> <li>Extract text from PDF using Claude/ChatGPT/Grok </li> <li>Run it through Azure TTS (Text to Speech)</li> <li>Done!</li> </ol> <p>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.</p> <p>I tried asking different AIs to extract only title, abstract, and main content:</p> <ul> <li>Claude Sonnet: Failed</li> <li>Grok: Failed with errors </li> <li>Claude Opus: Success</li> </ul> <p>Turns out extracting clean content from academic PDFs is harder than expected.</p> <h2> From Manual to Automated </h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>So I coded one with Claude Sonnet, built it in Next.js, deployed on Vercel, and shared it.</p> <p>This is why I love being able to code!!!</p> <p>Visit my github blog to read more<br> <a href="https://battlelolo.github.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a><a href="https://battlelolo.github.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://battlelolo.github.io/</a></p> tts azure ai webdev