Narrator's guide

Your production card

The Productions dashboard shows a card for each production assigned to you. New invitations appear under Incoming, with Accept and Decline buttons. After you respond, the card moves to the appropriate group and its ⋯ menu becomes available.

The ⋯ menu has two items. Production roles lists everyone assigned to the production, their roles, invitation responses, assigned chapters, and deadlines. You can view the crew but cannot change assignments; those controls belong to the lead or an administrator. Production details shows the full description and details of your assignment, including your role, deadline, and assigned part of the publication.

The waveform overview & listening

The overview shows a group of waveform bars for each sentence, coloured by status. Use it to navigate the section and control playback.

Play, skip, and change speed

Click a sentence to make it active, then press play (or Space) to listen from there. The play button becomes a pause button while playing; the spoken word highlights as it is read, and the time readout shows your position and how much of the section is left. Use the skip buttons to jump a sentence at a time, and the speed menu to slow down or speed up (e.g. 1.5×) without changing pitch.

Navigate by waveform

Click any bar in the timeline to jump to that sentence. Double-click to zoom to fit, scroll or use the zoom slider to zoom in and out, and Shift+scroll to pan. The hint line under the canvas always documents these gestures.

Chapter or whole-publication scope

The scope toggle switches the overview between the current chapter and the whole manuscript, so you can gauge overall progress. (Trimming is only available in chapter scope.)

Recording

Choose a recording mode

Choose Continuous to record from the active sentence onward in one pass, or Per sentence to record only the active sentence. In per-sentence mode, select a sentence with ↑ / ↓ and play it with Enter. SpokenWords remembers your mode between visits.

Record and stop

Select where you want to start and press the red record button (or R). The button starts pulsing and turns into a stop button, the level meter appears at the top right of the text, and the active sentence's bar shows a live microphone waveform that tracks your reading. Press it again (or Esc) to stop. The status bar then reports the take's progress: Processing transcription… while it is saved, and how many recordings are still syncing while it uploads. The sentences turn green once the finished transcript is back.

Watch your level

The level meter has a green target zone. If your signal stays too low for a few seconds, a weak-signal warning appears with a one-click boost; it clears once the level recovers.

Fixing a take

Re-record one sentence

Choose Record again from a sentence's status-dot menu. The status bar names the sentence you are re-recording and offers Cancel to throw the new take away; press the record button again (or Esc) to keep it. Press U or the overview's Re-record the last sentence button to redo the most recently recorded sentence, regardless of cursor position.

Punch in mid-sentence

While listening, press punch-in (shown only during playback, or Shift+R) to start re-recording from exactly where playback is — so you fix only the tail of a sentence and keep the good start.

Delete a take

Choose Delete recording from the status-dot menu to remove the take immediately, without confirmation. The sentence returns to not recorded, or another take becomes active if one is available.

Inspect levels & switch takes

The status-dot menu on a recorded sentence shows the take's audio level, notes when a take was recorded by someone else, and — when a sentence has more than one take — lets you switch between them so you keep the best.

Trimming a take

Adjust a take's start and end to remove silence or include more surrounding audio. Both trimming controls edit the same take.

Inline waveform

From a recorded sentence's status-dot menu, choose Show waveform to open a per-sentence waveform right under the sentence, with word boundaries, two draggable trim handles, and a play button. Drag a handle, then Save trim to save.

Overview scissors

Select a recorded sentence and click the scissors in the overview header. The overview zooms to that take and shows two handles plus a sub-bar with the duration change, Save, and Reset (which puts the handles back where they started). Playback stops while you trim and the play button is disabled; Esc, the scissors again, changing section, or starting a recording all leave trim mode.

Microphone setup

Open Reading settings with the gear icon in the rail at the right edge of the studio. There you can pick your microphone device, set the input gain, and watch a live level preview. Auto-calibrate listens while you speak normally for about three seconds and then sets the gain for you; if it hears no voice it says so and leaves the gain alone.

During recording, the footer's microphone controls let you adjust gain immediately and choose a device for the next recording. They stay synchronized with the settings dialog.

Speech recognition

Open Speech recognition with the head-and-circuit icon in the rail at the right edge of the studio. It lists four speech models, each with its download size. Nothing is downloaded until you press a model's download button, and its trash button removes it from this computer again.

Speech feedback has four levels. No sync is where you start: nothing listens while you read, you record one sentence at a time, and each take is saved without word timings. The other three levels use the smallest model to mark your reading, so they stay unavailable until that model is downloaded.

The radio button beside each downloaded model chooses the model for final sync. The overview header then offers Run final sync on N sentences for the sentences that model would read better; press it to run final sync on them. The work runs in the background, waits while you record, and carries on after you close the browser. Turn on Run final sync automatically after Stop if you want it to start by itself after each recording. When you trim a sentence that has misread or missing words, it is offered for final sync again, so the words at its new edges are heard.

Offline & syncing

SpokenWords saves recordings locally when you are offline and uploads them in the background when you reconnect. Notifications show progress and confirm when syncing finishes. Failed uploads have a retry action. Find these messages in the notifications bell and status bar.

Handing a section to the next role

You finish one section at a time. When the section you have open is recorded, click Mark article complete in the header: that section moves on to the reviewer, who is told it is waiting. Your other sections are untouched, so you can hand on chapter 3 and carry on recording chapter 4.

The handover button appears when your narrator assignment covers the open section and it is at Recording.

You cannot undo this action yourself. It changes the section's stage. If you hand over a section too early, ask the producer to move it back using ⋯ ▸ Article ▸ Change stage.

Keyboard shortcuts

Open Keyboard shortcuts from ⋯ for the shortcuts available in your current role. Common narrator shortcuts are listed below.