The Quality Gate

The Quality Gate

The honest worry with any AI voice is a line that comes out fluent but wrong — a dropped clause, a clipped word, a stretch of dead air — and you only catch it three chapters later. Castwright runs two independent checks so that mistake gets caught before you do, not after.

Check one: the acoustic gate, before a chapter assembles

Every rendered sentence is checked acoustically — dead air, near-silence, clipping, duration drift against what the line should take to say — before the chapter is assembled. A sentence that fails gets automatically re-recorded, up to a fixed retry budget, with no action from you. A line that still doesn't clear after its retries ships anyway with the best take kept, and the chapter is marked Suspect so you know to take a listen rather than trust it blindly.

Expanding a Suspect chapter's row on the Generate screen shows exactly where the trouble is: a waveform strip with the flagged stretch rendered as an amber band, an "N issues to review" caption, and a tooltip on the band itself naming the reason — for example, a line rendered suspiciously short against how long it should have taken to say, flagging a possible truncation.

A chapter that clears cleanly shows none of this — no Suspect badge, no amber band, every character row reads Done straight through. That's the gate working quietly in the common case: nothing to review because nothing needed a re-record.

Check two: voice drift, after a chapter renders

The acoustic gate catches a broken take. It doesn't catch a voice that rendered cleanly but drifted away from the character it's supposed to be. That's what the drift detector is for: once a chapter renders, it compares that chapter's synthesis against the character's established voice profile and flags any character whose rendered voice has wandered.

Flags are severity-tiered — Severe, Moderate, Mild — and open into a comparison view: the profile's voice attributes (gender, age, warmth, pace, authority, emotion) as they were "when rendered" against "now," a Listen control that A/B-plays the actual chapter audio against a fresh sample of the current profile so you can hear the drift rather than just read it, and a one-click Regenerate for that chapter. A Severe flag offers Auto-regen — no confirmation step, because at that severity the drift is confident enough not to need a second opinion. Anything you're not worried about, Dismiss (or Dismiss all) clears it.

Screenshots of a flagged Suspect chapter and the voice drift report are tracked as a follow-up (Refs #1286) — posing either convincingly needs the acoustic-QA/drift pipeline wired into the marketing capture fixtures, not just a route to navigate to.

Where a flag follows you: the preview surface

A Suspect flag isn't stranded on the Generate screen. The same amber-marked waveform follows the audio wherever you play it — including the mini-player that pins to the bottom of every view. Hit preview on a chapter from Generate, or play it from the Listen tab's chapter list, and a bad take lights up amber in the scrubber before you've even pressed play — so a flagged line never has to be rediscovered by ear from scratch.

Next: Listening & Revising.