Find characters: cast every voice in your audiobook automatically

Short answer: open Characters in the studio and press Find characters. It reads your whole book, works out who speaks every line of dialogue, and casts a voice for each main character that fits their gender, age and personality. A few minutes later your cast is ready. Listen to a chapter, fix anything it got wrong, and generate.

The problem it solves

A novel with a full cast is the hardest kind of book to turn into a good audiobook. It's not that any one line is difficult. It's that there are thousands of them, and each one has to go to the right voice.

Until now, casting a book in Warblize meant doing it by hand. You added a voice for each character, then went through the manuscript sentence by sentence, giving each line of dialogue to whoever said it. For a short story that's fine. For a 90,000-word novel it's an afternoon or more, and it's easy to lose track of who's speaking in a long exchange where nobody says "he said".

Most authors skipped it and let one narrator read everything. That works, but it leaves out much of what makes a full-cast audiobook enjoyable to listen to.

Find characters does the casting for you, so a full cast is no longer a day's work.

What it does

When you press Find characters, Warblize reads the whole book, chapter by chapter, and then:

• Finds every speaker. It works out who says each line of dialogue, including long conversations where the speakers aren't named. It also recognises when a character is called different things, such as "Dr. Shaw", "Elena" and "Shaw", so they stay one character.
• Separates dialogue from narration. In a line like "We have to go," she said, reaching for her coat, the spoken words go to the character and "she said, reaching for her coat" stays with the narrator. That's how a narrator performs a scene, and it's what listeners expect.
• Casts the main characters. Each character with a real part gets a voice of their own. The voice is chosen to match their gender, their age and their personality as the book describes it: a gentle grandmother, a cold officer, a quick and curious child. It also sounds clearly different from the narrator.
• Shares a few voices among minor characters. The guard with two lines, the waiter and the voice on the radio are read by a small set of extra voices. Within a chapter, different minor speakers get different voices, so you can still tell them apart.
• Follows first-person narrators. If a character tells part of the story themselves, as in a diary, a log or a chapter in their own words, that narration is read in their voice rather than the narrator's.
• Reads messages and transcripts. Lines like HOUSTON: We're working on it go to the right speaker too.
• Handles characters who change with age. If a character appears as a child in one part of the book and as an adult in another, they can get a separate voice for each, when they have enough lines.

When it's finished, each character appears in the Characters panel with their voice and a line of their own dialogue, so you can see at a glance who they are.

How to use it

1. Open your book in the studio

Upload your manuscript as usual, or open a book you've already started. Find characters works best on the full book, because it learns who the characters are from all of it.

2. Pick your narrator first (optional)

The narrator is the Default character in the Characters panel, and it reads everything that isn't dialogue. If you'd like a different narrator, change it before you start. Find characters picks the character voices to sound distinct from whichever narrator you've chosen.

3. Press Find characters

Open Characters and press Find characters. You'll see its progress as it goes: reading the chapters, checking the cast, then assigning the lines. A full-length novel takes a few minutes.

If the voice service is busy, Find characters waits and tries again on its own. You'll just see it keep working; there's nothing you need to do.

4. Listen to a chapter

Open a chapter with plenty of dialogue and play it. Each sentence shows the avatar of the voice reading it, so you can follow along and check that the right person is speaking.

5. Fix anything that's wrong

Find characters gets most lines right, but not every one. Some exchanges are ambiguous even to a careful reader. When a line goes to the wrong character, click the avatar beside it and choose the right one.

When you fix a line in the middle of a back-and-forth conversation, the lines after it in that exchange are corrected too. A conversation that came out the wrong way round can usually be fixed with one click.

6. Adjust the voices, if you like

Every voice is a suggestion. You can change any character's voice, rename them, or open the settings icon to customize how they sound with a pace and a one-line description.

7. Generate

Generate your chapters as usual. Each line is read by the voice it's assigned to.

What it won't touch

We built Find characters so you can run it at any point without losing work:

• Lines you've assigned by hand stay as you set them. Once you've chosen who says a line, Find characters treats that as final.
• Voices you've changed or customized stay. If you picked a different voice for a character or changed their settings, a later run keeps your choice.
• Chapters with audio are left alone. Their lines and voices stay exactly as they were when the audio was made.

So you can run it again after editing your manuscript, or after fixing a few lines, and it will only redo the parts it chose itself.

Tips for the best result

Use quotation marks consistently. Find characters relies on punctuation to tell dialogue from narration. Most published books are already consistent. If you're working from a draft, see how to prepare a manuscript for an audiobook.

Check the busiest chapters first. Long conversations between two or three characters, with few "he said"s, are where a mistake is most likely. They're also where a fix helps most.

Customize the main voices before you generate. Voice settings apply to audio made after you change them, so set up the voices first, then generate.

Keep the narrator steady. A calm, clear narrator makes the character voices stand out. Let the cast carry the personality.

Who it's for

Find characters is most useful for fiction with dialogue: novels, short story collections, and children's books with a few memorable voices. For non-fiction or a book with almost no dialogue, a single narrator is usually the better choice, and you don't need to run it at all.

It's in the studio now, for every book. If it gets something wrong in a way that seems consistent, such as a character it keeps mixing up or a style of dialogue it doesn't follow, we'd like to hear about it. Those are the cases that help us improve it.