SpokenWords helps a team turn a manuscript into recorded, reviewed audio ready for publication. In the shared Studio, you prepare the text, record narration, review takes and export finished audio. This guide explains the roles and steps involved.
Choose English or Swedish under Language in the account menu. This guide uses the English names for roles and features.
People can be assigned five roles. Leads manage productions and producers manage chapters. Editors, narrators and reviewers prepare each chapter in sequence. Leads and producers can preview those working views with the role switcher.
Manages the production: imports its manuscript, assigns people and supplier organizations, oversees progress, checks delivery readiness, processes audio and exports to webarch. The lead's assignment covers the production itself.
Manages assigned chapters, including stages, imports, exports, reviews and staffing. The lead handles production metadata, delivery settings and supplier organizations.
Prepares text for narration with emphasis, pauses, pronunciation, alternative readings, tone, comments and structure cues. Narrators and reviewers see these annotations in context.
Records the narration sentence by sentence. The system transcribes and time-aligns each take, so playback highlights words karaoke-style. The narrator can re-record, punch in mid-sentence, and trim takes.
Listens to narration and approves sentences or rejects them with feedback. The narrator can re-record sentences and mark the feedback as resolved.
Administrator is an organization status granted in webarch. It appears in the Members list and gives the person the lead's controls on every production owned by the team. Team status and production roles are separate: a person may be an Administrator or Member of a team and hold any of the five production roles above. See the Administrator's guide.
After accepting an invitation, each person works on their assigned chapters when those chapters reach the appropriate stage. The editor hands a prepared chapter to the narrator, who hands the recording to the reviewer. The next person receives an email notification. Chapters move independently, so work on different chapters can happen at the same time.
Lead imports a manuscript on the Productions dashboard, picking one of a product's issues. The new production starts as a draft.
The Lead uses Production roles to assign editors, narrators, reviewers and chapter producers, with optional deadlines. The assignee working at a chapter's current stage can hand it over; leads and producers can also set stages directly.
Editor annotates pronunciation, emphasis, pauses, and structure in the Studio, then hands each chapter on as it is ready.
Narrator reads each sentence in the Studio. Recordings are transcribed and aligned automatically; the waveform overview shows progress per sentence.
The Reviewer listens and approves sentences or provides feedback. The narrator addresses unresolved rejections, recording new takes where needed.
Lead runs the export checklist, clears any blockers, marks the production publication-ready, and hands each finished article back to webarch.
The Studio is the shared workspace for editing, recording, reviewing and export. The manuscript fills the centre, with a status dot beside each sentence. The waveform overview below it provides playback, skip and speed controls, with recording controls underneath. The top bar includes search, the chapter's stage, handover, focus mode and notifications. Its ⋯ menu offers Keyboard shortcuts to every role, and, to the people who run the production, the Export check and the Article and Whole production menus. Bookmarks, post-processing and reading settings open from the panel rail at the right edge instead. Use View as in the account menu to switch role views. Open the chapter list on the left, or use Previous and Next to move between chapters.
Editors use annotation tools, narrators use recording controls, and reviewers approve or reject recordings. Leads and producers use the role switcher to oversee these views. For detailed instructions, see the lead, editor, narrator, reviewer, and administrator guides.
Some Studio controls work the same whoever you are:
| Panel rail | A column of icons at the right edge of the studio opens the side panels: annotations, bookmarks, post-processing and reading settings, as far as your role and the current view offer them. Point at an icon to see which panel it opens; click the open panel's icon to collapse the panel back to the rail. |
| Focus mode | The eye icon hides the header, the panels and the overview's playback controls for distraction-free reading; the waveform and the status bar stay, and V still opens Reading settings. A floating button brings everything back. |
| Notifications | The bell collects warnings and sync/offline status; the most important one also shows inline in the status bar. |
| Keyboard shortcuts | Open Keyboard shortcuts from ⋯ to see the keys available in your current role. |
| Locked manuscripts | When a manuscript is locked, the status bar explains why and editing or recording is disabled. |
| Reading settings | Open them with the gear icon in the panel rail, or press V. Text size, line spacing, line length, view and spoken form are remembered across visits — as are your microphone device and level. |
| Progress | The header shows the open chapter and progress on your assigned chapters (3 of 5 chapters done). The overview header shows your reading position through the book as a percentage. |
Per-sentence status in the Studio (the dot beside each sentence):
| Dot | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Grey | Nothing to report yet — not recorded, not reviewed. Every sentence carries a dot, and this one stays near-invisible until you move the pointer over the text. |
| Green | Recorded, or approved by a reviewer |
| Red | Rejected by a reviewer and awaiting a re-record, or something is wrong with the take |
| Amber | The recorded words differ from the text, or syncing needs your attention |
| Blue | The recording is on its way to the server |
| Grey | Pre-recorded audio from the imported document. A new take replaces it for this sentence. |
Assignment statuses describe invitation responses: invited, accepted, or declined. Older assignments may show pending without a sent invitation. Assignment progress depends on how many assigned chapters have passed that person's stage. Chapters move through Draft → Recording → Review → Done. Done chapters still need a separate export to webarch. During and after export, recordings, reviews and stage changes are locked.
The changes since SpokenWords 15, in Swedish: speech recognition downloads only when you ask for it, from a new panel in the Studio; the final sync runs when you choose and the manuscript shows which sentences wait for it; and previous audio is shown in grey.
A developer guide to the pages, components and shared modules, with a dependency diagram.
How narration and reading tools show a book's text, and proposals for the Studio's manuscript and original-document layout.
Part 2 draws the chosen direction and its toggles.
The vanilla web components, Open Props tokens, and shared CSS used across every page.