Voice Engines
Castwright supports four TTS engines. They surface in two different places: Kokoro, Coqui, and Qwen are local models with disk/VRAM residency, managed from Admin → Model Manager (each row shows install state, size, and — once usable — a Load/Unload pill; see The Model Control Pill). Gemini has no local model to manage — it's a cloud voice catalog you pick from directly on a character, in the Profile Drawer's "Model voice" picker.
See Installing Castwright for setup steps for each.
Ships as a standard engine — installs with the Python sidecar — and every character carries a Kokoro preset as a fallback, so a book still generates even before Qwen or Coqui are set up. On this box the weights haven't been fetched yet, so Model Manager shows it "Weights missing" with an Install action rather than a live Load/Unload pill — that's the genuine pre-install state, not a broken one.
An optional add-on (not installed by default). This box has the model
weights on disk but not the coqui-tts Python package, so Model Manager
flags it "Needs repair" with a Repair action instead of a Load/Unload
pill — again, the real state of an engine whose package step hasn't run yet.
Once the package is present, Coqui gets the same idle/loading/ready pill as
Qwen below.
Qwen is the flagship per-character engine — the one the cast's designed voices actually use. It's fully installed and resident on this box: the Base (0.6B) model is loaded and marked Default, with a live "ready" pill and a Stop action.
Qwen also ships a higher-quality Base (1.7B) tier and a VoiceDesign (1.7B) model (used transiently while designing a bespoke voice) — both listed as separate Model Manager rows. See The Model Control Pill for a full load/unload walkthrough using the 1.7B tier.
Gemini isn't a local model, so it has no Model Manager row — there's nothing to load or unload. It shows up instead as one of the tabs in a character's Model voice picker (Profile Drawer → Voice profile), alongside Coqui and Kokoro, once that character's engine is set to something other than Qwen. Each tab is a fixed catalog of prebuilt voices for that engine.
Next: The Model Control Pill.