The Challenge
SpiritualReading is a personal project built to give a Korean-language spiritual reading collection a calm, book-like home on the web. The text is 마음에서 들려오는 사랑의 소리 (translated by 한정아), the Korean edition of Henri Nouwen's The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom. The goal was to design a reading experience that felt as comfortable as a printed page, and to add a natural-sounding voice narration option so the text could be listened to as easily as it could be read.
Built a 43-page paginated reader with a warm, paper-like background and serif Korean typography, so long-form devotional reading feels closer to a physical book than a webpage. Readers can adjust the font size and move between chapters with simple page navigation.
Built a dual-engine text-to-speech system: the primary engine calls ElevenLabs' eleven_multilingual_v2 model to generate natural-sounding Korean narration, with each chapter's audio pre-generated and cached so playback starts instantly. A browser-based Web Speech API engine runs as an automatic fallback whenever the API path isn't available.
The reader's pagination, chapter navigation, UI, and the ElevenLabs/Web Speech integration were all built through an AI-assisted "vibe coding" workflow — iterating with an AI coding assistant in natural language rather than hand-writing every line. It was a hands-on way to explore how far that workflow could go for a real, working app, end to end.
Highlights
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