InScien

A local app working on top of your Zotero library to

1. Extract references from papers and get citation counts
2. Visualize citation connections
3. Narrate papers and follow along efficiently (with a custom processing for technical papers and local offline TTS)

Requirements

• Python 3.12 or newer
• Zotero desktop with a local data directory (for read-only Zotero access)

Install and run

uvx inscien

or

pip install inscien
inscien

This starts the app on a loopback port and opens it in the browser. Zotero is found automatically. If not found, set its data directory on the Settings page.

How to

1. In the sidebar, open a Zotero collection.
2. Build a paper to add its references to the map. A build reads the reference list from the PDF and resolves it against OpenAlex, Crossref and Semantic Scholar.
3. Narrate a paper to make its audiobook. The first narration downloads the voice weights (about 340 MB) once.

One job runs at a time. The job pane shows its steps and progress and can cancel it.

CLI

inscien build <paper.pdf>      # add a paper to the library
inscien narrate <paper.pdf>    # make a narration
inscien voices                 # list the voices
inscien sample am_echo af_heart   # one paragraph in those voices, to choose by ear
inscien --help

inscien narrate takes --voice (comma-separated for several tracks), --speed and --device cuda.

Storage

Everything InScien writes is under one directory, INSCIEN_HOME:

library/     built papers (paper.json, extract.json)
bundles/     finished narrations, and where each listen stopped
narrate/     narration queue and per-paper work files
import/      PDFs staged for a build
data/        settings, the Zotero snapshot, the current job
weights/     the voice weights

To move or back up your data, move or copy that directory.

Configuration

All optional, as environment variables.

Narration runs on the CPU at a few times realtime. For a GPU, replace onnxruntime with onnxruntime-gpu in the same environment and set INSCIEN_TTS_DEVICE=cuda.

Development

Needs uv, and Node only to build the UI.

make setup      # .venv with the package editable, and the frontend deps
make backend    # API on :8000 with reload
make frontend   # UI dev server on :3000
make test
make wheel      # build the UI into the package, then the wheel

License

See LICENSE.