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.
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 second, optional pass reads the words themselves. Off by default (turn it on in Advanced Configuration → QA gates), it transcribes each rendered line and checks it against the script — the "fluent but wrong" case the acoustic check can't see: a dropped clause, a swapped word, a line that says something other than what was written. Together the two checks cover both ways a take can go bad — the sound of it, and the sense of it.
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 each flagged stretch rendered as an amber band, an "N issues to review" caption, and a tooltip on each band naming the reason — a line rendered suspiciously short against how long it should have taken to say, or a line whose words drifted from the script.
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.
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.
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.