
Audicle
Self-hosted service that turns saved articles and documents into a private podcast feed with cloned-voice narration.
Audicle is a self-hosted Podcasting 2.0 service that turns saved articles and documents into a personal podcast feed. Paste a URL or upload a file (PDF including scanned pages, DOCX, Markdown, text, HTML, or an image) and a worker runs extraction, cleaning, narration, chapter detection, and transcription. A few minutes later the result appears as an episode in your own RSS feed with cloned-voice narration, chapters, per-episode artwork, an LLM-written summary, and a WebVTT transcript. Any podcatcher, including Pocket Casts, Overcast, or Apple Podcasts, can subscribe to it like a normal show.
Narration uses Chatterbox, an MIT-licensed text-to-speech model, conditioned on a short reference clip you supply. There are five voice slots and a per-episode picker for random, last used, or a specific slot. The bundled TTS wrapper is GPU-pinned by default, but a CPU image ships with every release from 0.56.0 on, so a machine without CUDA can still run it at roughly 5 to 10 times slower. If you already run Chatterbox or another OpenAI-compatible speech server, you can point Audicle at it instead. Generated audio is verified by transcribing each chunk with Whisper and comparing it to the requested text, and chunks that diverge are regenerated.
The stack is a FastAPI backend with SQLite, the job worker, the RSS feed, and a React operator UI served as an installable PWA. Extraction uses trafilatura by default, with an optional Firecrawl engine and a headful-browser sidecar for JavaScript-rendered and paywalled pages. Feeds can be locked behind a 64-hex key that also covers audio, artwork, transcripts, and chapters, and a daily sweep can delete episodes past a retention window.
Compared with Speechify or a hosted reader, Audicle does not meter characters or keep the audio inside a proprietary app: the output is a standards-compliant podcast feed plus MP3 files on your own disk, narrated in a voice you supply. It is narrower in scope than a full voice platform, with no mobile app, audiobook store, dubbing, or voice marketplace, but it is free, private, and runs entirely on your hardware.








