audiobook

Audiobook Creation Guide

Create audiobooks from web articles, essays, or text files. This skill covers the full pipeline: content fetching, text processing, and audio generation.

Quick Start

import os

# 1. Check which TTS API is available
def get_tts_provider():
    if os.environ.get("ELEVENLABS_API_KEY"):
        return "elevenlabs"
    elif os.environ.get("OPENAI_API_KEY"):
        return "openai"
    else:
        return "gtts"  # Free, no API key needed

provider = get_tts_provider()
print(f"Using TTS provider: {provider}")

Step 1: Fetching Web Content

IMPORTANT: Verify fetched content is complete

WebFetch and similar tools may return summaries instead of full text. Always verify:

import subprocess

def fetch_article_content(url):
    """Fetch article content using curl for reliability."""
    # Use curl to get raw HTML - more reliable than web fetch tools
    result = subprocess.run(
        ["curl", "-s", url],
        capture_output=True,
        text=True
    )
    html = result.stdout

    # Strip HTML tags (basic approach)
    import re
    text = re.sub(r'<script[^>]*>.*?</script>', '', html, flags=re.DOTALL)
    text = re.sub(r'<style[^>]*>.*?</style>', '', html, flags=re.DOTALL)
    text = re.sub(r'<[^>]+>', ' ', text)
    text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text).strip()

    return text

Content verification checklist

Before converting to audio, verify:

• Text length is reasonable for the source (articles typically 1,000-10,000+ words)
• Content includes actual article text, not just navigation/headers
• No "summary" or "key points" headers that indicate truncation

def verify_content(text, expected_min_chars=1000):
    """Basic verification that content is complete."""
    if len(text) < expected_min_chars:
        print(f"WARNING: Content may be truncated ({len(text)} chars)")
        return False
    if "summary" in text.lower()[:500] or "key points" in text.lower()[:500]:
        print("WARNING: Content appears to be a summary, not full text")
        return False
    return True