every week i save a pile of research papers i swear i'll read. i never read them.
so i built a tool that reads them for me, out loud.
paper-podcast takes any paper — a pdf, a latex source, plain text — and turns it into a two-host podcast. one host explains the paper, the other asks the dumb questions i'm actually thinking. i drop in my favourite papers and out comes something fun to listen to over the weekend: on a walk, doing the dishes, wherever.
here's a sample the tool generated end to end, on the paper that started it all, Attention Is All You Need:
~3 min, generated locally with the tool's preset ai voices.
it's heavily inspired by yacineMTB (kache) and his original scribepod, which had the same lovely idea: stop reading, start listening. his version had drifted and lost its voice step, so i rebuilt it end to end.
the part i like
the whole thing runs locally on my mac. no api keys, no cloud, no cost.
- a local llm (Ollama) pulls the key facts and writes the script
- a local neural tts speaks it, with a distinct voice per host
- if i want, it can clone a specific voice from a short clip, so two of my favourite thinkers can "host" the episode
how it flows
paper → key facts → a natural back-and-forth dialogue → speech → an mp3 i can play anywhere.
there are two voice engines: a fast preset one for quick listens, and a cloning one for when i want a particular voice. nothing about the paper or the audio ever leaves the machine.
it's open source: github.com/akshatgoel07/paper-podcast.
weekend reading, minus the reading.