KittyBooks

KittyBooks turns fanfiction, brought in from a link, pasted chapter text, or an epub or txt file, into continuous, seekable audiobooks narrated by a self-hosted, open voice engine, so narration carries a compute cost rather than a per-word fee. A chapter is split into sentences, each is narrated, the audio is stitched together at the sample level so there are no gaps, and the timing of every sentence is recorded into a single map that drives gapless playback, a follow-along text highlight, and tap-to-seek. The voice catalogue offers dozens of narration voices with previewable samples, and chapters can be downloaded for offline listening.

The system is a monorepo split by responsibility: an API over Postgres, a background worker running the narration queue, a React Router 7 web app, a React Native phone app, and shared packages for the data contract and audio pipeline. A two-phase encoder publishing short opening segments first cut time-to-first-audio to a few seconds on CPU-only narration, which otherwise renders slower than real time.

KittyBooks is real, deployed engineering shown honestly as work in progress rather than a finished product. As of the last working session the owner judged the overall effort a shortfall: the phone app had not run cleanly on his device and his own book had not narrated successfully for him, so the pieces are proven in code and on test accounts rather than polished for an everyday reader, with rebuilding the phone app on a proven foundation recorded as the next step.