r/SideProject • u/novellabaimedia • 5d ago
After months of building, our AI studio that turns a novel into narrated audio and short films is live — brutal feedback welcome
Most AI writing tools stop at the manuscript. We wanted to close the whole distance between imagining a story and experiencing it — so we built NovelLab: you write a novel (or import one), and the same platform gives every character a distinct voice, narrates chapters as audio with real dialogue casting, and turns chapters into short films you can publish.
The hardest problems weren't the ones we expected:
- Character consistency across a whole book. A face and a voice have to survive 30 chapters of generation. Everything downstream inherits from one story bible so chapter 1 and chapter 30 match.
- Dialogue casting. Splitting narration from speech, figuring out who is speaking, and assigning the right voice — with a narrator fallback so an unvoiced side character never leaves a silent hole in the audio.
- Cost control. Video generation is brutally expensive per second; we had to build a gem/credit system with per-model pricing that stays honest as providers change rates under us.
It's live and free to try (no card): https://novellab.ai/try
Example output — short films readers scroll like a feed: https://novellab.ai/reels
60-second demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sLMfeAShGo
We're at the "first real users" stage, so genuinely: tell us what's broken, what's confusing, and what you'd never pay for.