Reviewing Cast and Assigning Voices
This is the spreadsheet view of your cast — the point where "Castwright found six characters" becomes "here's who each one actually sounds like." Every speaking character gets a row: role, the voice currently assigned, line counts, and a status pill (Designed, Matched, Carried, Sampled, Generated, and so on), so you can see at a glance who's ready and who still needs attention.
Below, Saltgrave — book two of the Hollow Tide series — where the cast is a mix of Designed (new for this book), Matched (a possible-duplicate flagged for merge), and Carried voices reused from book one. That mix is the whole point of a series: the narrator, Insp. Cray, and Dr. Wren keep the exact voice they had in The Drowning Bell, with no redesign needed.
"Design full cast" designs bespoke Qwen voices for whatever's still missing, in one pass, rather than working through the roster one character at a time — see Designing a Voice for the single-character version of the same flow. "Continue to manuscript" is always available from here; the voice-readiness gate that actually blocks an incomplete cast lives at generation start, not on this screen, so you're free to move on and come back.
The voice library panel on the right — filterable by All / This book / Series, with search — is where you assign a voice: drag a voice card onto a cast row on desktop, or tap Assign on the card, then tap the row you want it on. Filtering to Series (as above) surfaces exactly the voices worth reusing across this book's series.
Two rows above flag "These look like the same person" — a possible-duplicate pair Castwright noticed from a shared scene pattern or a shared minor role. Merge collapses them into one character (carrying the merged name into aliases, so future books still recognize them); Dismiss keeps them separate if they really are two different people.
Torn between two takes on a character? Select exactly two cast members (their row checkboxes) and click "Compare" to open them side by side — tune gender, age range, and tone on either side, re-sample to hear the difference, and save only the one you actually like.
Below, Insp. Cray and Dr. Wren — both carried into Saltgrave from The Drowning Bell — compared side by side: each side shows its resolved voice and profile bucket with a ≠ marker on anything that differs, and the same gender/age/tone controls as the single-character drawer, so you can nudge one side and re-sample without leaving the comparison.
Before you ever reach the cast table above, the confirmation screen — the first thing you see right after analysis finishes — lists every detected character with a matched-or-generate decision. Below is The Drowning Bell, book one of its series: "7 speaking characters detected · 0 matched from your library · 7 new to generate" — there's no earlier book yet, so every voice generates fresh. Once a series has a book behind it, a returning character is offered back here with its provenance instead (exactly what "Matched" and "Carried" mean on Saltgrave's cast table above), so continuity across a series is a decision you confirm once, not a redesign you repeat book after book.
Next: Designing a Voice.