Show HN: Sornic – Listen to any article, PDF, or book page (no signup)

2 points by digi_wares 4 months ago · 0 comments · 2 min read

I built Sornic for people who have more to read than time to read it:- students drowning in papers, commuters with a backlog of saved articles, anyone who'd rather listen while doing something else. Paste a URL, drop a PDF, or snap a photo of a book page- get natural-sounding audio in seconds.

How it works:

1. Input: URL / PDF upload / photo of printed text (OCR) 2. AI cleanup: strips ads, fixes formatting artifacts, optimizes for speech 3. TTS: Google Cloud Chirp HD voices (6 voices, adjustable speed)

No signup. No account. 3 free articles per day. Just paste and listen.

Tech stack: Next.js 14, Google Cloud TTS (Chirp 3 HD + Standard), Google Cloud Vision (OCR), Claude Haiku (content cleanup), Upstash Redis (rate limiting), Vercel.

Some decisions I'm happy with:

- Google TTS primary, OpenAI TTS fallback. Switched after Google TTS cut my costs from $77/4 days to ~$2/day.

- Mozilla Readability for extraction, Firecrawl as fallback, Claude Haiku to strip "Subscribe to read more" junk before TTS.

- Purchase codes instead of accounts- buy a credit pack, get a portable code that works across devices. No auth needed.

- PDF extraction uses pdf-parse → Claude cleanup. Photo uses Cloud Vision documentTextDetection → Claude cleanup. Both feed into the same TTS pipeline.

- $50/day spending cap in code so I don't wake up to a surprise bill.

What I'm still figuring out:

(1) Chrome extension (the real distribution play- it's how Speechify grew) (2) Whether to move from credit packs to subscriptions- users don't really like subs unless it a very famous website (3) Getting scanned/image-based PDFs working (currently only text-based PDFs)

Would love feedback on voice quality, extraction accuracy, and whether the no-signup approach makes sense long-term.

Try it: https://sornic.com Telegram bot: https://t.me/SornicBot

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