A quality you can see: what's new in v1.11.0

v1.11.0 is a cast-first, quality-gated release. It changes the first thing you do with a book and makes the last thing you’d worry about — did every line land? — something you can actually see.

Meet the cast before the manuscript. Confirming a book’s cast now takes you straight to your characters, not the page: design the cast first, then move on to the manuscript when you’re ready. And if a speaking character still needs a voice when you go to generate, Castwright stops to ask — design them now, or, for an English book, carry on with a generic stand-in — instead of failing loudly halfway through a render. A book in another language can’t take that shortcut: every character needs a voice of their own before it can perform.

A quality gate you can see. Every book now carries a receipt: how many lines were checked for a clean recording, how many were verified word for word against what was actually said, how many characters were checked against their own voice, and what’s changed in your cast since you rendered. It’s on the Listen screen once a book is done, and it updates live while a book is still generating. Download it as plain text or JSON. And if a check hasn’t run yet, the receipt says so plainly, rather than pretending everything came back clean.

The voice-match check shows its work. For a book with a lot of minor characters, checking every voice against itself can take a while — and it used to sit at “0 checked” the whole time, looking stuck. Now it tells you which character it’s on and how many are left, right on the Quality Gate card, as it goes. If that check ever gets interrupted on a book that’s already finished, a “Resume scoring” button picks it back up with one click.

Steadier through the long night. An overnight book no longer quietly eats your computer’s memory — a slow appetite that used to make the app stop and catch its breath between chapters is gone, so long books run for hours on a steady footing. A safety check that used to mistake the busiest second of a big scene for an emergency — and restart the engine mid-chapter to “rescue” it — has learned the difference between hard work and real trouble. And a Mac or a graphics-card-free machine no longer queues its voices cautiously: those machines now perform multiple voices together, at full speed.

One address, no port to remember. Listening from another device on your network, castwright.local now works exactly as typed — no :8443 to get wrong. You can refresh your computer’s local certificate from inside the app, so a new device or network trusts it right away, and pairing your own computer is now one click, no phone required.

What’s next is the natural sequel to the gate: one voice, all the way through — checking a character still sounds like themselves across a whole series, not just that they were handed the right voice. And voice cloning — your own voice, with consent, kept at home — is still what we’re building toward.

Many voices, one machine.

Download the beta, or update from inside the app.