Search "AI audiobook generator" and nearly everything that comes up does one job: it takes a manuscript you already have and reads it aloud. That's useful if you wrote a book. If what you want is to listen to a book that doesn't exist yet, say a course on wine, or a mystery set on a space freighter, those tools have nothing to read.
Gnothi writes the book and then narrates it. You pick fiction or nonfiction and give it a topic or premise, and it writes the book one chapter at a time, each chapter narrated as soon as it's written. I built it, so read this as the maker's description, not a review.
After that, the next chapter comes when you ask for it, or daily, weekly, every two weeks or monthly. A chapter runs roughly 25 minutes of listening. Books keep going by default, which suits a serial or an ongoing course. Set a series length if you want it to stop at a target chapter, as a finished audiobook.
Gnothi remembers what earlier chapters covered, so chapter 12 builds on chapter 3 instead of repeating it. In fiction, a Logbook keeps characters and facts straight.
Nonfiction opens with "What do you want to learn?" and these starting points: Learn a skill, Get better at a game, Keep up with a field, Work through a book, Make a personal change and Understand a period. The cooking example reads: "Teach me to cook dinner at home. Start with the basics I keep skipping, like knife work and seasoning, and build toward a week of meals I can make without a recipe."
A course works from a syllabus you can edit. Any segment can be allowed to research the internet, so lessons on a fast-moving field use current sources. The Teach Me segment gives you an exercise to practice, and the Check-in segment a step to take.
Some finished and ongoing ones you can listen to for free:
Fiction offers A quest, A mystery, A crew in space, A family, A teaching tale, A tabletop campaign and Survival, or your own premise. You can also give a story something to teach. The lesson then happens in the plot: the problem the hero faces demands the skill, and how it gets used decides the outcome. The story never invents a method: each lesson is marked as literal, adapted or metaphorical.
Mine is Continue Without Me, a 1980s-flavored cyberpunk story about a man laid off by automation and the AI business agent he hires, which teaches the agent tools a one-person business runs on. I wrote about how it started.
You can steer a story as it goes. Write in Gnothi's journal, and the next chapter picks it up. The tabletop campaign example works that way: "Our session notes steer each chapter: if we write that we raid the goblin camp, the next chapter tells how it goes." A friend can turn up in your book as a character, too.
Every chapter is narrated automatically. Free accounts hear the default narrator. The one-time unlock that comes with any top-up adds:
And if you do already have a manuscript, the same unlock narrates it: upload an EPUB, PDF, .txt or .md and Gnothi turns it into one audio file.
There's no subscription. A chapter costs about a dollar in credits, narration included, and every new account starts with enough for about four chapters, so you can try it free. After that, a one-time $10 top-up adds roughly nine more chapters and the unlock above. Top-ups go up to $200, and credits don't expire. Pricing has the details.
If you already pay for Claude, you can run a book on your own Claude routine: your plan writes the chapters, and Gnothi charges only for narration, a few cents a chapter.