Casting your audiobook
An audiobook is a performance, not just a reading. You choose who narrates your book, and — if you want — you can give individual characters their own voices, so their dialogue actually sounds like them. Here’s how to use it well.
1. Choose your narrator
The narrator is the voice that carries your whole book — the storytelling voice. You have 28 English voices to choose from, American and British, male and female, from warm and intimate to deep and cinematic.
Listen before you decide. On the audiobook screen, tap the ▶ next to any voice to hear a short sample. Read a paragraph of your own book in your head while it plays — does the voice fit the mood? A cozy mystery wants warmth; a thriller wants weight; a memoir often wants something close and plain.
There’s no wrong answer, and it costs almost nothing to try another. Pick one, generate, listen to a chapter, and re-render with a different narrator if it isn’t right.
2. Give characters their own voices (optional)
This is the part that turns a reading into a cast. Add a character — say Maya — and assign her a voice. When we render, we read Maya’s dialogue in that voice, while narration and everyone else stay in the narrator’s voice.
How we know who’s speaking: we read the text around each line of dialogue for the speaker, the way you do. Standard attribution works best:
“I’m not going back,” Maya said, and shut the door.
Rita frowned. “You don’t have a choice.”
Both of those get cast correctly — the first by “Maya said,” the second because Rita is named right before she speaks. Dialogue we can’t confidently attribute simply stays in the narrator’s voice, so nothing ever sounds broken.
3. Writing that casts cleanly
- Use plain attribution — “…,” Maya said or Maya asked, “…”. Fancy tags (“Maya interjected acidly”) still work, but the standard ones are surest.
- Name a character near their first line in a scene. Once we’ve seen “said Maya,” nearby lines fall into place.
- Use the character’s name as it appears in dialogue tags. If your text says “Mrs. Chen,” add the character as Mrs. Chen, not Chen.
- Don’t over-cast. Two to five distinct voices reads beautifully; a dozen similar ones gets confusing. Cast the characters who matter.
4. Characters who speak another language
Beyond the English narrator voices, there are voices in Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Hindi, Portuguese and Chinese. If a character speaks another language, cast them in a matching voice for an authentic accent. You’ll find them in the voice dropdown when you add a character.
5. Preview, generate, refine
Rendering happens on a GPU and usually takes just a few minutes. It runs once — no retries, no runaway cost — and you can re-render any time you change the narrator or the cast. So experiment: generate, listen to a chapter, adjust, and go again.
One honest note: these are AI-narrated voices, and every audiobook here is labelled that way so listeners always know exactly what they’re getting. That transparency is part of how we can carry audiobooks the big platforms won’t.