I got tired of manually turning Reddit stories into videos, so I built a tool to automate it.

You know those TikToks and YouTube Shorts with some random parkour or Minecraft gameplay in the background, and an AI voice reading a dramatic story? A few months ago, I fell down that rabbit hole and thought, "Hey, I could do that."

So I tried making a few.

The first one was fun. The second one was okay. By the tenth time I had to copy-paste a post, clean up the formatting, generate a voiceover, find some background footage, and then painstakingly sync the subtitles... it got old. Really old.

The process was always a grind, and the bottlenecks were always the same:

- Cleaning up the original post to make it work as a script.

- Manually timing the subtitles to match the narration's pacing.

- Finding background video that wasn't distractingly bad.

- Making the whole thing feel "native" to short-form video.

Since I'm more of a coder than a video editor, my brain went straight to one place: "Why don't I just automate this whole damn thing?"

So, that's what I did. I started building a simple tool that:

Rewrites the story into a script that’s paced for a short video.

Generates an AI voiceover.

Adds automatically synced captions.

Slaps it all on top of some looping, "viral-style" background video.

Basically, it turns a URL into a ready-to-post faceless video. What started as a personal script has now become a simple web tool.

It's still a work-in-progress, and I'm constantly tinkering. The next big challenges are:

- Better Hooks: How do you actually get someone to stop scrolling in the first 3 seconds?

- Better Voices: Making the AI voices sound less... well, AI.

- Smarter Subtitles: It's not just about syncing; it's about emphasizing the right words at the right time.

- More Variety: What are the options beyond Minecraft parkour? (Seriously, I need ideas!)

This has been a surprisingly fun challenge, especially figuring out the async media processing and making the rendering stable.

If there's anyone else here building tools for creators or in the short-form video space, I'd love to connect and trade notes.

And of course, I'd love to get your feedback. If you were to use a tool like this, what's the #1 feature you feel is missing from the current landscape?

Thanks for reading!