Help
Enough to get a manuscript in, work on it by voice, and get it back out.
Getting your book in
From the library, press Import and choose a Word document, a Markdown file or plain text.
- Headings become chapters. If there are no headings, lines like "Chapter Four" are used instead.
- Blank lines separate paragraphs, and a paragraph is the unit of everything that follows.
- You are shown the detected chapter split as a preview and nothing is saved until you confirm it. If the split is wrong, fix it before committing rather than after.
A long manuscript takes a minute or two. Coming from Scrivener, compile to docx first and import that.
Listening
Open a chapter and press play in the bar at the bottom, or press P on a paragraph to start from there. Speed runs from 0.5x to 2x. The counter shows paragraphs rather than minutes, because a paragraph is what you act on.
Audio is generated once per paragraph and cached, so the first pass through a chapter has a short wait on each paragraph and every pass after that is instant.
Flagging while you listen
When a paragraph lands wrong, press F or tap the flag. Playback keeps going. The point is not to break the listening to fix something; the point is to mark it and stay in the flow.
Back at a desk, open the flagged list from the chapter toolbar and work through only what you marked.
Re-dictating a paragraph
- Start. Press D on the paragraph, or tap the microphone. Playback pauses.
- Say the paragraph. Speak it as you want it to read. You do not need to dictate punctuation; the cleanup pass handles commas, capitals and dialogue formatting.
- Compare. The new version appears beside the old one. Read both.
- Accept or discard. Only when you accept does the paragraph change, and the version you replaced is kept in the history.
Character and place names from your codex are given to the transcriber, so an invented name is spelled the way your book spells it. If your names are unusual, filling in the codex first makes dictation noticeably better.
Keyboard
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| Space | Play or pause |
| Up / Down, or J / K | Move between paragraphs |
| P | Listen from the focused paragraph |
| D | Dictate a new version |
| E or Enter | Edit the paragraph as text |
| F | Flag for revision |
| H | Revision history |
| ? | Show this list in the app |
The codex
Characters, locations, items, factions, relationships, plot threads and a timeline. It is worth filling in for three reasons beyond keeping track: names improve dictation accuracy, a character can be given their own reading voice, and a chapter can be checked against it for contradictions.
You do not have to type it all. Scan manuscript proposes entries from the prose, each with a count of how often the book actually mentions it, and you accept or reject each one.
Getting your book out
Export in the chapter toolbar produces a docx or an epub of the whole book. There is no charge and no condition. Do it whenever you want a copy on your own disk, and do it before any big revision if it makes you sleep better.
Undo
Deleting a paragraph, a note or a timeline event happens on one click and offers Undo in the toast that follows. Chapters and codex entries ask first, because they take things with them. Deleting a book asks you to type its title and cannot be undone, which the dialog says.
Your prose is never destroyed by editing: every previous version of every paragraph is kept and reachable with H.
Still stuck
Write to [email protected] and describe what you were trying to do. See contact.