Spoken Beta V0.8.2: Dual Narration, Previews, and Explore!

Dual Narration

Romance authors, you asked, and we listened! Introducing Dual Narration. Common in romance audiobooks, dual narration mirrors the novel’s structure, where chapters alternate between characters’ viewpoints – typically hero and heroine. And while the default is dialogue within a chapter being read entirely by its assigned narrator, the author can go into passages, separate out the lines read by the other character, and choose that line to be read by the opposing voice. Which means, technically speaking, we now also have DUET narration!

Explore Page

What was previously known as the “search” page will now be known as the “explore” page. With the introduction of channel follows in v0.8, channel tags have now become an even more important part of the Spoken experience. Browse the new explore page to find your followed channels, as well as the channels trending on Spoken! Another great improvement to the explore page is that the display channels now show three across rather than two.

Social Cards

With the 0.8.2 release we’ve beefed up the social sharing experience. Sharing your profile or project, whether it be via text or social media, will now show the profile picture or cover art associated with it. Along with a description that includes likes/listens for a project, and followers/listens for profiles. This makes sharing your content even more interesting and engaging!

1 Minute Preview Playback

Ever since version 0.6, users who come across Spoken have been able to interact with the platform without the need for signing up, which we call guest mode. We’re excited to announce an upgrade to guest mode that allows users to listen to a 1-minute preview of any Spoken project for free. Send your projects to family and friends for a free preview of your work!

Intro fixes for projects that don't have Narrator

With the 0.7 release came the Author introduction feature, where you can introduce your work, or have your narrator introduce your work, OR you can do both. One use case we ran into is that some stories don’t have a distinguished narrator. You can now choose from any of your characters/voices to introduce your project.

Spoken Beta V0.8: Introducing Discovery On Spoken, Lexicon, and more!

Since some of our more groundbreaking enhancements of our V0.7 release including single-sitting full audiobook narration and custom-generated character voices, we're settling in to a few important requests, the ones from YOU!

We’ve now added email and password as a way to register for Spoken, but with our V0.8 release today we have added a number of other important enhancements. We're listening (because you're listening)!

Let’s dive in.

“On Spoken” Updates, driven by Playlists, Topics of Interest, and Techie Things

This, no doubt, will be the first thing you'll notice about the release: Our updates to the On Spoken page. The first "carousels" you'll see are curated lists from our content team. This is the new concept of Playlists, and soon (next release) users will be able to create and share their own.

Listeners have asked that we make it easy to find and discover the projects and writers that match the genres and projects they like, and  the writers they already follow. Using our new Topics of Interest list (more information on that below), we now rotate a genre carousel of projects from each of the topics that you follow. This new layer of personalization should help listeners more quickly find the authors, and stories, they’ll love.

We also now rotate through the authors you follow to suggest similar authors.

And we rotate through the projects you like to suggest similar projects.

Topics of interest

Listeners asked that we improve our personalization of content on our On Spoken page, and we're starting by requiring every user choose at least three topics of interest so that we personalized content by genre. This is the beginning of our framework for a unique project discovery experience that will grow significantly over time. If you’re familiar with Spoken already, you know about our channel tag system. This enhancement builds on that foundation (with more expected in the next release).

With every genre in our Explore page, or for any channel tag you click on, you can follow that topic.

Drag to reorder

Users can reorder their projects on their profile page by dragging the corner handle.

Lexicon: 

You (especially you SciFi and Fantasy writers) have asked us for it, and we're listening: The ability to detect, and manually input, a lexicon of words to mass-correct mispronunciations. We now automagically detect the words that might have multiple or difficult pronunciation to seed your Lexicon, found at the top of the Passages tab in Studio. The first step is to select, or add, a lexicon word or phrase. Next, you will go through to identify how many instances of that word or phrase exist in your passages. Then, you will generate and play how it sounds without any change. Finally, you can add a phonetic alias and test how your replacement will sound. Spell out the word or phrase how it sounds, e.g. “T'Challa” might be “TuhChahluh".

Terms of use

We have added a "Key Points" section at the top to summarize important aspects of the agreement, and we have updated our Third Party Website and Third Party Services section with additional information to clarify our relationship with services like the narration technology services. 

Other updates

• Home page background design change

• Spacing between carousels tightened up

• Em dash padding change from 200ms to 500ms

• 2000ms padding between author intro and first chapter

• Review titles can be longer without getting cut off

• Search bug fixes

• Merge character button always visible on page

• Fixes regarding adding new installments

Spoken Beta V0.7.5: Project Mastering And Email Account Creation.

When you have a release as momentous as 0.7 last week, it's good to have a bit of a breather release in the interim… but even interim release 0.7.5 deserves some celebration. 

With the rapidly expanding breadth and depth of our voice library, compounded by the amazing custom-designed voices offered in Spoken Studio, it’s really important not to lose sight of an Author’s main objective.

To give their writing its voice. And we want to do that in the best, easiest way possible.

To ensure the highest quality and integrity for projects published on the Spoken Network, we’re thrilled to introduce "Mastering" as an option for all projects to meet and exceed audiobook streaming standards. 

In addition, due to popular demand, and to provide even more flexibility, we’ve added the ability to create your user account on Spoken with an email address and password instead of requiring users to utilize Google or Apple authentication. 

Let’s dive in.

AUDIO MASTERING

You now have the choice to utilize Audio Mastering when publishing your project. This  thoroughly tackles inconsistent voice volumes and background noise to deliver clear, uniform audio across your work. It is especially beneficial when using Multi-Character / Multi-Voice (MCMV) where there’s a greater likelihood of audio disparity. Spoken's mastering also ensures every Spoken work meets modern audiobook and streaming standards, providing the best playback fidelity (across all types of speakers, be it headphones, car, phone, etc.) for the most consistent listening experience.

Note that adding mastering adds significant time to complete your last "Publish" step, but we'll email you when it is complete. You can estimate the amount of time as roughly ½ as much time to master your work as the length of your longest installment's audio.

EMAIL/PASSWORD LOGIN

Along with Google and Apple account logins, new users can now register using an email and password.

“FINISH UP” IS NOW “PUBLISH”

With additions such as Audio Mastering, and more to come, The “Finish Up” tab has been relabeled “Publish”.

NEW STUDIO OVERVIEW VIDEO

OTHER FIXES

• iOS image uploads

• Audio playback fixes

• The ability to stop the passage generation and narration processes