Make an audiobook with Claude or ChatGPT

Give the assistant a story, a chapter or a whole book — paste it or attach the file — and ask for an audiobook:

"Làm sách nói từ truyện này. Giọng dẫn chuyện nữ miền Bắc, mỗi nhân vật một giọng riêng."

The assistant turns your text into a script — the narration, and every line of dialogue with the character who says it — picks a narrator and a voice for each character, and tells you what it will cost. Once you agree, VieNeu reads the book chapter by chapter and masters each chapter into an MP3 ready to publish.

This works in every app on the MCP server — Claude and ChatGPT show a player for the chapters right in the chat.

How it goes

1. The script. The assistant creates the book and adds the chapters in order. It copies your text word for word — its instructions forbid summarizing or rewriting — and leaves out tables of contents, page numbers and copyright pages. Free.
2. The cost. Before anything is spent it tells you the estimate in tokens: every character is billed like any synthesis, with the default engine's rate (get_token_balance tells you how far your plan goes).
3. Start. When you say yes it starts the book. Each chapter is billed when it starts rendering; a chapter that fails is refunded automatically and made again on its own (see failures).
4. The wait. Audiobooks are made while VieNeu's servers are not busy with people waiting for audio — expect hours rather than minutes, often overnight. Books waiting at the same time take turns, a chapter each, so a short book is never stuck behind a long one. You do not need to keep the chat open: when the book is done, a notification appears under the bell on vieneu.io.
5. Listening. Ask "Sách nói xong chưa?" The assistant shows the progress and, for each finished chapter, a download link (valid 24 hours — ask again for fresh ones). In Claude and ChatGPT a player lists the chapters and plays them one after another. Every chapter is also saved in your Library on vieneu.io.

Voices

• The narrator reads the narration and the chapter titles.
• Characters — up to 30 — each get their own voice. Minor characters can stay with the narrator: the assistant writes their lines as narration.
• Describe what you want ("một bà cụ miền Nam", "cậu bé tám tuổi") and the assistant searches the catalogue with list_voices. Your own cloned voices cannot read audiobooks yet.

How a chapter sounds

What	How
Between paragraphs and lines	0.6 s of silence
After the chapter title	2.5 s
At a scene change	2 s
Start and end of the file	0.5 s of silence before, 3.5 s after
Loudness	−19 LUFS integrated, peaks at most −3 dBTP
File	MP3, 128 kbps, mono, 48 kHz, tagged with title, book, author and track number

Stores differ in the files they accept — Audible, for one, asks for 192 kbps at 44.1 kHz — so check your store's requirements before uploading.

Tools

Tool	What it does	Cost
create_audiobook	Create the book: title, author, narrator, characters' voices	Free
add_audiobook_chapter	Add a chapter as a script in reading order, or continue a long one	Free¹
start_audiobook	Start the book — also resumes a stopped book and redoes failed chapters	Tokens
get_audiobook	Progress, and the download link of each finished chapter	Free
list_audiobooks	Your books, newest first — finds a book from an earlier chat	Free
cancel_audiobook	Stop: chapters not started are never billed; one already being made finishes	Free

¹ A chapter added to a book that is already being made joins it, and is billed when it is made.

A chapter's script is a list of segments: narration (no speaker), or one character's spoken words. A line such as "— Đi thôi! — Lan nói." becomes Lan saying "Đi thôi!" followed by the narrator reading "Lan nói."

Limits

Limit	Value
Chapters per book	200
Characters per chapter	60,000 (about 80 minutes), less on a plan with a daily cap¹
Characters per book	1,500,000
Characters with their own voice	30

¹ A chapter is billed in one go, so it has to fit the plan's daily (or weekly) token cap — on a trial of 50,000 tokens a day that is about 12,800 characters. The book reports its ceiling (chapter_chars_max), and a chapter over it is refused when added, with the size that fits, rather than waiting for tokens that never come. The assistant splits such a chapter into several.

An assistant writes every word of the book into its tool calls, a few thousand characters at a time, so long chapters arrive in several pieces — that is normal. Each piece says how many segments the chapter already has (after_segment): a piece sent twice is refused instead of being added twice, a piece that went missing is noticed before the next one lands, and each answer shows the words the chapter now ends with. Before starting, the assistant checks every chapter against your text. A whole novel is a long conversation: it is fine to carry on in a new chat, where "tiếp tục sách nói …" finds the book again.

Stopping, resuming, failures

• "Dừng sách nói" stops the book. Chapters not started are not billed; the one being made finishes, because it is already paid for.
• "Làm tiếp" resumes it, with the cost of what is left.
• A chapter whose rendering fails — a server restarting mid-chapter, a voice server down — is refunded and made again on its own a few minutes later, continuing from the parts already made, twice. Only a third failure counts: the book then ends as partly done, and starting it again redoes only the failed chapters.
• A chapter whose job stops moving for 45 minutes is treated the same way, so one stuck chapter never holds up the books behind it.
• If the finishing step (the MP3) fails, it is tried again with growing waits for about an hour; only then is the chapter handed over as WAV instead.

Your text

You are reading your text to VieNeu, so make sure you may: your own writing, a public-domain work, or one you hold the audio rights to.

From your own code

The same books are in the Cloud API: POST /v1/audiobooks, then POST /v1/audiobooks/{bookId}/chapters and POST /v1/audiobooks/{bookId}/start; follow progress with GET /v1/audiobooks/{bookId}. See Every operation and the API reference.