Building a Fully Local PDF Read-Aloud & PDF-to-Audiobook Desktop App with Kokoro 82M, Qwen, and llama.cpp

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA Products
pdf text-to-speech audiobook offline desktop-app open-source

Summary

Speechfony is a new fully local desktop app that reads PDFs and EPUBs aloud with sentence highlighting, semantic search, and MP3 audiobook export, using Kokoro TTS and on-device embeddings. It prioritizes privacy and offline use, with an open-source MIT license.

Hey everyone, I’ve been building Speechfony - a desktop app for reading PDFs (and EPUBs) with offline text-to-speech. Open a document, listen sentence-by-sentence with highlighting, or export selected pages to an MP3. Everything runs locally: Kokoro for speech, and an on-device embedding model for semantic search. I wanted something that didn’t ship my documents to a cloud TTS service, worked offline after the first model download, and felt closer to “listen while you read” than “dump the whole PDF into a generic TTS box.” What works today PDF + EPUB reading Sentence-level playback with live highlighting Adjustable header/footer margins (so repeating page chrome doesn’t get read aloud) Resume where you left off Semantic search (meaning + keywords), local embeddings Audiobook export to MP3 (desktop only) Hardware acceleration where available (CoreML / DirectML / CUDA) Expect rough edges. Known gaps I’m already tracking: Multi-column layouts, tables, code, equations Footnotes / citations, TOC / index pages, captions / sidebars Scanned PDFs (no OCR yet) Non-English / RTL Voice & rate controls are limited Pronunciation of company names / niche technical terms can be wrong (that’s mostly the Kokoro lexicon - as I build a rust binding myself) Platforms: macOS Apple Silicon, Windows x64, Linux x64 (glibc ≥ 2.38). No Intel Mac builds for now. On first launch it downloads the voice model (~130 MB from Hugging Face). After that it’s offline. Links GitHub: https://github.com/pguso/speechfony Downloads: https://github.com/pguso/speechfony/releases If you try it on a real document you’d actually listen to (papers, manuals, books, reports), please tell me: What broke or sounded wrong? What PDF/EPUB layout confused extraction or playback? What’s missing that would make you use this regularly? Issues and PRs welcome. Fully open source (MIT License).
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