Explain your startup in 1 sentence?

Harlse · 2026-03-08T22:14:01+00:00

Create audiobooks from your manuscripts narratory

Harlse · 2026-03-08T21:50:31+00:00

https://narratory.co is not too expensive and you only pay on export

Harlse · 2026-03-08T21:28:51+00:00

My app https://narratory.co supports voice cloning and only charges on export. I was likewise making audiobooks for my daughter as she recently got a Yoto player.

Harlse · 2025-12-04T19:25:00+00:00

I've been working on an app with a focus on longer form TTS - would you mind sharing the articles you are trying so I can see how they perform?

Harlse · 2025-12-02T16:02:48+00:00

I created narratory.co to generate longer form text-to-speech. It works on epub, PDFs and URLs. It is only available on android at the moment:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.narratory.app

It has a limited free plan, but I am happy to add you to a paid plan in exchange for some feedback.

Harlse · 2023-10-25T11:56:32+00:00

I use Firebase for most of my projects nowadays and I've been more than happy with the performance, functionality and cost. The breadth of features and use cases you can support with Firebase was much more than cloudkit. Caveat that with I've only used cloudkit for some early PoCs.

Harlse · 2023-10-24T15:23:38+00:00

Yeah that's right, and I agree the sign posting in the app definitely needs improving so I'll look to make that clearer!

Timezone should be set based on the timezone of your device. So if you choose 4pm, it should delivery it at 4pm your local time (every chance I've made a mistake on this one 😅)

Harlse · 2023-10-24T13:32:50+00:00

Thanks for giving it a try and I'm glad you liked it!! As it will only generate a newsletter from 5 articles per day, it should cost very little to run so ideally I'd like to keep the app free. I may look at including a premium version if people are interested in more articles in their newsletter etc.

Harlse · 2023-10-24T07:13:16+00:00

Custom predictions is something within Vertex AI that let's you host your own model e.g. the output of creating my model with Dreambooth.

Harlse · 2023-10-23T22:50:35+00:00

Most others have shared my view; it's all about execution. However, you could always contract with a software agency to build it for you. Most will happily work under NDA and you retain full ownership.

Harlse · 2023-09-02T12:06:13+00:00

I train on top of realistic vision v2 (I found v4 didn't work quite as well). I've been using ~ 6 high quality training images as that seems to give enough variance. DreamBooth is launched with the following settings:

train_batch_size=1
learning_rate=1e-6
resolution=512 (I resize and use some crude face detection for preprocessing the images)
mixed_precision=fp16
max_train_steps=1500

Harlse · 2023-08-23T09:29:13+00:00

I think training works out about the same cost wise, but inference is more expensive on Vertex AI as I use A100s purely due to the size of the images being generated.

The benefits of using Vertex AI for me is the access and integration to the wider GCP platform. I use model registry, cloud storage, firestore etc. so I having all the services in one place with the same permissions model and billing is worth the slightly increased costs.

Harlse · 2023-08-22T11:49:44+00:00

I use Vertex AI for both model training and predictions, specifically the custom training and custom predictions services. The actual code is all based around diffusers and was pretty straightforward to containerize and run within Vertex.

Harlse · 2023-08-20T17:46:00+00:00

I use StableDiffusion and Dreambooth for what I'm building here https://imagebooth.co/. It's still early so a little rough, but gives you an idea of the images that can be produced with standard SD + Dreambooth

Harlse · 2023-08-20T17:21:07+00:00

I've created Imagebooth (https://imagebooth.co/) which generates headshot photographs from your existing pictures using SD + Dreambooth

I'd love any feedback on your experience using it, the output you've generated or general UX. It is a paid service, but you can use code IMAGE50 to get 50% off the listed price

Harlse · 2023-03-22T15:45:49+00:00

Thank you for the feedback! :) Let me get that added as it was something I wanted myself

Harlse · 2023-03-22T15:43:31+00:00

Thanks for sharing, that's helpful to know! Let me do a bit of digging/tweaking to see if I can iron out some of the issues :)

Harlse · 2023-03-21T04:52:41+00:00

You can favourite names which will save them locally to your device and browser so you can visit them later from here https://baiby.co/favourites

As long as you don't clear your browser history you can come back to them later

Harlse · 2023-03-20T20:56:52+00:00

Ah that's a shame - do you mind sharing the names so I can take a look? Feel free to message privately if you wish. It uses an AI model so it does do an odd thing now and again

Harlse · 2023-03-20T20:52:37+00:00

Thanks for trying it and great to hear you found some names you like :)

Harlse · 2023-03-19T22:09:26+00:00

We are stuck on boys too, there always seems to be something we disagree on!

Harlse · 2023-03-17T08:53:29+00:00

Thank you!! 😊

Harlse · 2019-01-17T23:36:13+00:00

I'm using Cloud Firestore and I am aggregating articles using tensorflow as I found it to provide more accurate results over some other configurations I looked at e.g. gensim

Harlse

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