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
