Narrate

Narrate turns a paper into an audiobook. A local voice reads the author’s own sentences. The text is never rewritten or summarized.

Make a narration

1. In the sidebar, use Narrate on a paper.
2. The first narration downloads the voice (about 340 MB) once.
3. The job pane shows progress. When it is done, the paper shows Listen.

The narration reads the body of the paper. It skips tables, figures and the reference list, and speaks symbols in words.

Listen

Open a narration with Listen. The player shows the narration text next to the PDF.

• Follow the narration keeps the PDF on the sentence being read.
• Contents jumps to a section.
• Hover a citation in the text to see the reference it points to.
• Where you stopped is saved and the next listen starts there.

Voices and speed

The app narrates with the default voice. The CLI chooses voices and speed:

inscien voices                         # list the voices
inscien sample am_echo af_heart        # hear one paragraph in each
inscien narrate paper.pdf --voice am_echo --speed 1.1
inscien narrate paper.pdf --voice am_echo,af_heart   # one track per voice

Use a GPU

Narration runs on the CPU at a few times realtime. For an NVIDIA GPU:

1. Replace onnxruntime with onnxruntime-gpu in the same environment.
2. Set INSCIEN_TTS_DEVICE=cuda.