project2 min read
tg-vaani: a Telegram bot that talks back
A side project that reads my long PDFs to me, but smarter. It rewrites whatever you send into how a friend would actually say it, then reads that part out loud.
I don't like reading.
Okay that's not fully true. I like reading stuff I'm already into. What I don't like is opening a 10 page PDF that someone swears is really good, and slogging through six paragraphs of buildup just to find the one paragraph that actually mattered. By page three I've checked twitter twice and I'm done. The thing genuinely was good. Too bad.
So I made a bot that reads the PDF for me. Not the boring kind where it sounds like a robot reading a contract. It rewrites the thing first, into how a friend would actually tell it to you, and then reads it out loud.
What it does
You send it something. A line you typed. A PDF, a doc, a markdown file, whatever. A few seconds later a voice note comes back.
Turn on conversational mode and it rewrites the input first. The meaning stays the same. It just gets rephrased into how a person would actually say it. A 10 page paper turns into four minutes of audio I can listen to on a walk. A technical post turns into a story. A press release turns into whatever the actual point was.
Leave the mode off and it reads the original word for word. I use that for proofreading my own writing, or hearing what an email sounds like before I send it, or just sitting through something dense without staring at my phone.
The voices are decent. I usually pick whatever fits my mood. There's one that sounds tired in a flattering way which I use way more than I should.
How I actually use it
Mostly on walks after dinner. I queue up whatever I saved that week and let it run.
Some days it's a long slack thread I missed. Some days it's a research paper I would never actually sit down to read. Some days it's one of my own drafts, because hearing your writing out loud is the fastest way to catch a sentence that looks fine on the page and sounds dumb the second someone says it.
Access
It's just a fun side project. I made it for myself. Not really running it as a service.
The bot is live at @vaani_tts_bot. Start the bot and use it. If you've got an idea for it, send it. Might build it.