Two more languages, and the whole show on your tablet: what's new in v1.14

v1.14 is the biggest release since the beta opened. Castwright learns two new languages, the companion app grows up on the second screen, and a set of quieter changes underneath make the whole thing steadier than it was a fortnight ago.

Chinese and Japanese join the cast. A zh or ja manuscript used to be turned away at the confirm screen. Now it’s rostered, attributed, cast and performed through the same pipeline as every other language — script-aware analysis, attribution that tolerates an honorific fused to a name, and voices from either engine. Both ship with a full translation of The Coalfall Commission as a runnable sample, so you can hear one before you commit a book of your own. One honest caveat: how well Castwright works out who’s speaking in Chinese or Japanese depends on the analysis model you point it at — a local Qwen model reads them markedly better than the small default, and choosing it is still your call, not something we do behind your back.

The companion app opens up on the second screen. On a tablet or a foldable it’s no longer a stretched phone: your library runs down one side, the player down the other, and it keeps playing straight through a book switch or a turn of the screen. The lock-screen and car controls follow you across a switch, and your place is flushed the moment the app goes to the background. On a phone, nothing changes.

A chapter you haven’t downloaded now plays instantly at home. Tap any chapter on your home network and it starts — streamed straight off your own machine, with no certificate to install and no waiting for a download to finish. Your device’s key never leaves the app. Out of range, it says so plainly and downloads first, the way it always did.

Try the app before you pair anything to it. The pairing screen gained a “Try the demo” door: the whole companion app running against a self-contained sample library, with no server and no network at all. It works in airplane mode.

The reading stays local by default. Working out who speaks each line is the one step that ever had a reason to leave your machine. Castwright now reads your book with a local model out of the box. If that local analysis is unreachable and you’ve set a cloud key, Castwright can fall back to a cloud reader automatically so the book keeps moving — that fallback is on by default, and you can switch it off for good if you’d rather it never happen. Picking the cloud reader outright, rather than as a fallback, is always your call. When the cloud reader runs, requests are now sized to the free tier’s limits, so a long chapter can’t get dropped for being too big.

The GPU knobs are gone. Castwright used to ask you to hand-set a token budget and a handful of weights per engine — four confusing dials that mostly encoded a guess about your card. They’re retired. It now measures the free memory on each card and admits work that actually fits, covering every heavy step: synthesis, model loading, voice design, transcription. When a card genuinely can’t take another job, you get a message saying so instead of a hang. One dial survives, and it’s the one worth having: how much memory to leave alone.

A whole-book script review you can actually get through. A review of a full novel used to open as a flat wall of a thousand cards. It now opens collapsed, grouped by chapter and by kind, with approve-the-group controls for the mechanical fixes — while the two that genuinely need your eye, reattributing a line and flagging a non-story passage, still open one at a time. And a speaker the review discovers on dozens of lines asks you once, not once per line.

Move a character’s whole part in one action. Fixing a mis-attributed narrator used to mean reassigning hundreds of lines by hand — the case that prompted this had seven hundred. Now you pick the character, pick who should have said it, and move the lot, with a single-level undo that survives moving between the cast and manuscript views. Unlinking an alias can also point it at an existing character rather than only splitting it off into a new one, and the lines follow it either way.

Scene breaks are visible in the manuscript. Wherever your source had a word-free scene break — a dinkus, a row of asterisks, a rule — a hairline divider now renders above the line that opens the next scene. Nothing about chunking, attribution or synthesis changes; it just reads the way the book reads.

Designed voices survive an accidental re-analysis. Two faults let a re-run wipe a finished book’s per-character voices — the incident that found this stripped every language edition of our own sample book. A fresh re-analysis now carries the prior cast’s designed voices through, and a confirmed book no longer offers a stale paused analysis you can click into by mistake.

There’s more underneath: German dialogue no longer collapses onto the narrator, a first-person narrator’s own lines stop scattering onto a side character, a character detected under two names merges into one cast row, and a finished chapter no longer reads permanently stale because one of its lines carried a delivery cue.

Many voices, one machine.

Download the beta, or update from inside the app.