audiblez

Audiblez turns EPUB e-books into M4B audiobooks using Kokoro-82M text-to-speech on your own computer. It's for readers who want spoken versions of their books and control over the narrator, reading speed and sections included. The app is open source under the MIT license.

You can use a graphical interface or a command-line tool. Both serve the same purpose: converting an e-book into audio you can play in VLC or an audiobook player. It also produces separate WAV files for chapters, so the output includes individual audio files as well as the complete book.

Voice choices cover American and British English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese. You can choose a narrator and adjust the speech speed during conversion. Chapter selection lets you leave out sections you don't want read aloud, including through an interactive picker in the command-line tool.

Audiblez runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Speech generation uses the CPU by default, with optional NVIDIA GPU acceleration through CUDA and PyTorch. An Apple Silicon Mac can run it on the CPU, but it doesn't support Apple Silicon GPU acceleration. Google Colab is another supported place to run conversion with CUDA, though that uses cloud hardware rather than your computer.

The audiobook conversion relies on Kokoro for speech, espeak-ng for speech processing and FFmpeg to assemble the final M4B file.