Release: NovelForge 4.0

The $50 Windows desktop software NovelForge is now at version 4.0. This script and novel-writing software, from the maker of the worthy graphics plugin Dynamic Auto-Painter, now adds “over 50 local neural voices” for audiobook production, plus Word export, and more. Nice, though sadly there’s still no native Dark Mode for the UI — which may be a deal-breaker for many writers. The paid third-party software WindowsTop is the only thing that can make the entire UI go dark and retain visibility/functionality for the UI. NovelForge 4.0 does however now have a Dark Mode for its special ‘distraction free’ editor, which is something.

The new 4.0 version has been tested by me, and the Kokoro offline voices are surprisingly excellent (considering the installer is a mere 260Mb) and there are a lot of them. Lewis (British) is perhaps the best.

However, one can’t have dialogue read in different voices from the same page. There’s no SSML tagging system to change voices in mid-page. And, rather surprisingly, no-one has elsewhere made a Windows text-editor which integrates Kokoro in a way that can do multi-actor dialogue. It’s not even in Balabolka, the go-to TTS software, which one might have thought would be a natural fit for the local and real-time Kokoro.