Read while you listen to your Audiobooks
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I am a product manager, and in the last few months I got laid off, coupled with a disruptive job market. Due to this, I used to scroll short-form content a lot; I was a slave to it, and anything I picked to read had me going back to scrolling. This became a reading comprehension problem; my attention span was clearly in decline; I found that a lot of people were also not able to read without an assist like a physical book or an ebook, especially for readers with ADHD/Dyslexia - this problem was hard-hitting. So I built Hushbook- a read-along audiobook app that helps you read while you listen. It works with a tiny transcription engine that functions natively on-device and transcribes audiobooks in multiple languages. The app also has 20,000+ Audiobooks free to download. Last week, I also integrated the app to welcome ebooks and synchronize them with audiobooks. I see reading has taken a back seat due to a surge in short-form content; there is a need for a push to get going and start reading more books. Critical thinking has gone for a toss, and I want more people to start reading; this is a step forward.
HN · launched Sep 26, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 87%) · 0 views
Niche: ebook and reading apps · 190 launches, 18 in the last 7 days ▼ -33% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Vertical SaaS
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 190 launches in ebook and reading apps →
Could you build this?
Partial Audio playback and web interfaces are simple, but on-device, offline, word-level audio-text alignment and Whisper-style transcription require native machine learning runtime optimization.
What it would actually take: The core challenge lies in running high-throughput, low-latency automatic speech recognition (ASR) locally on mobile devices using CoreML/Whisper.tflite, generating word-level timestamps (forced alignment via CTC or dynamic time warping), and indexing the audio-text pairs in an offline local database.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Reading while listening may misunderstand the reading experience
Feature requests: Seamless switching between reading and listening
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 356 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #338 of 357 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 331 days after the earliest competitor.
- HushBook · ph · 2026-11-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- Open-source early-reading reader with phonics help · hn · 2026-10-19 · 23 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Maryanne: read or listen to ebook & PDF · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Early Reader · hn · 2026-04-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- narratarr · github · 2026-10-28 · 75 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- I built time to read all the things I want to · hn · 2025-12-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- chapter · github · 2026-10-01 · 52 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- dewarr · github · 2026-09-21 · 71 upvotes · similarity 0.50
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