Most audio complaints fall into three groups, and they have quite
different answers.
Nothing plays at all
Work through these in order:
- Check your device. Volume up, and on a phone check the silent
switch — it is the single most common cause of "the player runs
but I hear nothing". - Check the chapter has narration. Narration is opt-in, and
plenty of stories have none. A story without audio has no
player — if you can't find the controls, there is nothing to
play rather than something broken. - Check your connection. Unless you have taken the story
offline in an app, playback is streamed and needs the network.
A name is mispronounced, or a passage reads oddly
The honest answer first — there is no pronunciation markup an
author can add. You cannot spell a name out phonetically in the
chapter and have the narration follow it. That control doesn't
exist.
What is left is real, though:
- Reword it. Authors can often steer the reading by changing the
text itself — punctuation, sentence breaks, or an alternative
spelling of an unusual name. - Regenerate the narration. A fresh generation is a fresh
attempt.
If a story you are reading gets a name wrong, the person who can fix
it is the author, not the listener.
Regenerating deletes the old audio first
This one catches people out, so it is worth being blunt about.
Regenerating a narration deletes the existing audio before the new
one is built. The previous version does not stay available in the
meantime.
- Authors: expect a gap. Between the moment you regenerate and
the moment the new narration finishes — several minutes per
chapter — the story has no playable audio. Pick your timing. - Readers: if a story's audio disappears for a while, this is
very often why. It is not a fault, and it isn't permanent.
Editing a chapter does not re-narrate it
Changing a chapter's text does not silently regenerate its
audio. The existing narration keeps playing the words it was made
from, so after a meaningful edit the audio and the text can drift
apart until the author regenerates on purpose.
Reporting a genuinely broken file
If a chapter's audio is truncated, silent, garbled or plainly
corrupt, tell us. Open a ticket at /help/contact
and include the address of the chapter so we can listen to
exactly what you did.