Show HN: Tales – AI Podcasts for All Your Books

Hello Folks,

We’re the team behind Tales.so

Over the past few days we’ve been hacking on Tales.so [1] - An AI podcast for all your books.

Some features that we’re most excited about are —

  - AI podcasts for 10K+ books

  - Choose b/w podcast styles, i.e. — single person, or 2 people podcast

  - Evolving AI powered Book recommendations, based on your interests and listening history

  - Book reading lists of successful people, e.g. Marc Andreessen's [2], Elon Musk's [3]

  - Chat with Book Author AI Avatar

We used OpenAI, Claude, ElevenLabs, and the Cursor IDE to build this app up in just a few days. It’s astonishing how fast it came together.

Why Tales.so?

We were re-watching The Matrix and Chuck (TV Show) over the Thanksgiving break, and were struck by lightning when we saw the — “I know Kung-Fu moment” [4][5][6]. Thought, it might be cool and possible to build something similar, with AI at the helm. So, we built Tales.so for you to try it out.

Where to next?

A few ideas:

  - Crowdsourced podcast script editing, wikipedia style,

  - Funny mode, interactive modes for each podcast

  - Short videos to expand beyond Podcasts

Known Improvements —

We’re going to dramatically improve the audio quality for the 2 people podcast in the coming week, but didn’t want to wait to show what we have already till then.

We’d love to hear what you think!

Arpit, Charvi

[1] Web app — https://www.tales.so?ref=news.ycombinator.com

[2] Marc Andreessen's Book Recommendations - https://www.tales.so/collection/marc-andreessen-book-recomme...

[3] Elon Musk's Book Recommendations - https://www.tales.so/collection/elon-musk-book-recommendatio...

[4] I Know Kung Fu (Matrix 1999) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrzgxUhnYjY

[5] Chuck gets the intersect / First Flash - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snIO7L6ulmo

[6] Chuck - I know Kung Fu - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWciCU97bdQ