How we build: a bilingual audiobook production system
An internal build we own end to end, shown here as a capability example rather than a client win.
Our own team’s internal project, presented here as a capability example.
Problem
Turning a two-language print manuscript into finished audiobooks is a chain of fiddly steps, and each one can quietly go wrong. First every chapter has to be found in a source with inconsistent heading styles, so a careless split misses chapters or merges them. Then two text-to-speech voices have to work together even though they disagree on the basics: one reads emotional delivery cues aloud word for word, the other ignores them.
On top of that, every run at a professional text-to-speech studio spends a paid credit, so a mistake caught late is a mistake already paid for.
Approach
We built a toolkit that reads the manuscript, splits it into per-chapter scripts in four formats, and connects to a professional text-to-speech studio to create an editable audiobook project for each chapter.
A separate preview tool lets a person audition different emotional-delivery takes before locking a chapter. Every request to the studio runs first as a dry run, a rehearsal that changes nothing and costs nothing, so no paid credit is spent until a person reviews and approves it.
What shipped
- Chapter detection that ran on its own across both editions: it found all 105 English chapters and all 104 Spanish chapters, each edition about 20,000 words, with no manual counting.
- A full test suite passing: 6 of 6, confirming each part of the toolkit does what it should.
- Script export, delivery-take generation, and the dry-run studio push all completed; only the final live studio run remained at the time this was written.
Verified numbers
- 105 + 104chapters detected automaticallyall 105 English and 104 Spanish, from the manuscript
- 6/6tests passing
- 2text-to-speech voices reconciledone reads delivery cues aloud, one ignores them
- 100%studio requests rehearsed on a dry run before any spend
What this means for you
This is the same discipline we apply to internal work as to client work: read the source once, verify it with tests, rehearse anything that costs money on a dry run first, and keep a person in the loop before the final version ships.