Spoken Beta V0.8.4: Smart Tags, Duration Filters, and Take it With You!

With our 0.8.4 release Spoken is making a transition to more frequent, bite-sized and themed releases. For our 0.8.4 release, we bundled in some requested features, as well as laying groundwork for some strategic advancements. Here's the rundown!

Smart Channel Tags

We anticipate Smart Tags will become some of the unsung heroes of Spoken. We have added an unprecedented analysis of each story to identify those topics or categories that might be important or trending within a particular genre, such as "Enemies to Lovers" in Romance, or "Coming of Age" in Action / Adventure. But don't worry. If we get them wrong, you can always update them in the Publish tab of your project!

Voice selection page updates

We have some great updates on our Studio voice selection page. You can create or change the prompt we generate for your voices and re-submit it to refresh the top matches from our library.

Also, for your Multi-character / Multi-voice (MCMV) characters, we will make sure that the library voices are constrained to the gender, age range, and accent that we've derived automatically from your story. But no worries if they're not quite right, you can always change them.

Can’t miss Carousel

Right below all of the carefully cultivated playlists On Spoken, you’ll be able to find our new Can’t Miss carousel. The Can’t Miss carousel features new installments and projects from authors you follow.

Take it With You (TIWU)

One of our most highly requested features is finally here! We have always held that authors own all rights to their works, and our TIWU feature allows you to request and receive the audio files of your work. For now, we'll manually process your request, but eventually authors will have this directly available as a self-service feature. We will add our one-of-a-kind Spoken audio logo to the first installment. To enable the TIWU feature, your work must be published and public on Spoken.

Filter By Duration

Whether you’re a short story lover or a full audiobook lover, this new feature is great for the avid spoken listeners. If you have a general favorite length of story, just go filter any list of projects by duration and you can find that sweet spot of perfect story length.

Other Improvements:

• Edit Custom voice name

• Jump Back In Carousel at the top of On Spoken

• Clicking on a project link will direct you back to the project after signup

• A fix to adding new characters from the Passage Editor in Spoken Studio.