📄🔊 OpenReader

OpenReader is an open-source, self-host-friendly text-to-speech document reader built with Next.js for EPUB, PDF, TXT, MD, and DOCX with multilingual, synchronized read-along playback.

Previously named OpenReader-WebUI.

Get started in the docs.

✨ Highlights

• ▶️ Progressive background generation and playback — begin listening as soon as the first segment is ready while the worker continues generating ahead into one durable document timeline; cached audio is reused across seeks, reloads, and exports.
• 🧱 Layout-aware PDF parsing with PP-DocLayoutV3 (ONNX) — structured block detection, cross-page stitching, and geometry-based highlighting for precise read-along sync.
• ⏱️ Word-by-word highlighting via ONNX Whisper alignment through the compute worker control plane (NATS JetStream-backed).
• 📚 Five readable formats — synchronized EPUB, PDF, TXT, MD, and worker-converted DOCX, with generated PDF/EPUB library previews.
• 🎯 Multi-provider TTS — self-hosted OpenAI-compatible servers (Kokoro-FastAPI, KittenTTS-FastAPI, Orpheus-FastAPI) or cloud APIs (OpenAI, Replicate, DeepInfra).
• 🌐 Multilingual support — choose a document language for language-aware narration and highlighting. Available languages depend on the configured TTS provider and voice.
• 🎧 Audiobook export in M4B or MP3, assembled by the worker from the same playback cache.
• 🗂️ Flexible backend — embedded SeaweedFS or S3-compatible storage, SQLite or Postgres, server library import, and device sync.
• 🐳 Self-host friendly — Docker (amd64/arm64), built-in auth/session support, and automatic startup migrations.

🚀 Start Here

Goal	Link
Run with Docker Compose	Docker Compose
Deploy on Vercel	Vercel Deployment
Deploy external compute worker	Compute Worker (NATS JetStream)
Develop locally	Local Development
Configure auth	Auth
Configure SQL database	Database and Migrations
Configure object storage	Object / Blob Storage
Configure TTS providers	TTS Providers
Run Kokoro locally	Kokoro-FastAPI
Run KittenTTS locally	KittenTTS-FastAPI
Get support or contribute	Support and Contributing

🧭 Community

• Questions and ideas: GitHub Discussions
• Bug reports: GitHub Issues
• Contributions: open a pull request

📜 License

MIT. See LICENSE.