A cast that remembers: what's new in v1.10.0

Every release since the doors opened has been about reaching further. v1.10.0 reaches further still — but it starts closer to home, with the thing Castwright does that nothing else does: it remembers your cast, book after book, and now it shows you.

A cast that remembers. When the characters you designed return in book two, book four, book six, they come back in the exact voices you gave them — and now a chip on your shelf tallies it: how many voices have carried, across how many books. Open it and the returning cast is all there, which books each one appears in, how steady the run has been. Six books in, not a voice changed. You can lift a card from it worth sharing — one that leads with the number of voices you’ve designed and names every character who’s carried through. And a new check listens for the opposite: a line where a character’s voice drifts out of character, sounding like someone else even when the words are right.

Two cards, both working. If your machine has more than one graphics card, Castwright now puts both to work — you place each voice engine on the card you choose, from a list that shows each card’s name and how much room it has free. No more second card sitting idle while the first does everything. And each card is watched on its own, so a job that’s genuinely too big for a card stops cleanly instead of struggling in the background. There’s a separate guide on what runs on which card.

Five languages, one machine. After English and Russian, Castwright now performs Spanish, French and German books — reading each manuscript in its own language, giving every character a voice that speaks it, and keeping the cast’s descriptions in the book’s own tongue. Drop in a manuscript and Castwright recognises the language the moment you import it, and tells you plainly, before you commit, whether it’s one it can perform yet.

Emotion that stays in character. When a character gets angry, drops to a whisper, or softens with sadness, the voice stays theirs — the feeling performed by the character’s own voice, not a stand-in that wandered off. And when you want a book at its very best, a new Higher quality setting performs it on a larger, more expressive model — for a single character, or the whole cast in one tap — while your everyday voices stay quick.

The sounds between the words. Beyond the words on the page, Castwright now performs the small human sounds between them — a caught breath, a soft laugh, a sigh — written in by the same pass that reads your book, and delivered with a sense of how each line should land. Want to direct a moment yourself? Hand a single line its own stage direction, in your own words, performed at the higher-quality tier.

Read the way you’d say it. A price, a year, a percentage, a title — $1,200, 1999, 50%, Dr. — is now spoken the way a narrator would read it, not stumbled through character by character, in every language Castwright performs. And Script Review goes further than flagging now: ask it to review a chapter and it can fix the small attribution slips itself — reassign a line to the right character, set aside a stray heading, even follow a back-and-forth across a chapter break to place a line that opens with no tag of its own. Accept each fix or wave it off.

Underneath all of that, the quieter work: setup that tells you exactly what’s missing and often fixes it in one click, a voice engine that picks itself back up if it ever stalls mid-render, a friendly name for your machine on your own network, and progress bars that tell the truth. If you send your books to Audiobookshelf, a companion guide walks through the export end to end — it got the treatment it deserved this release.

Voice cloning — your own voice, with consent, kept at home — is still what’s next.

Many voices, one machine.

Download the beta, or update from inside the app.