Characters and recaps from your own Bridge, and sharing them back

With server 2.4.0 and a paired Bridge, AudioSilo’s optional companion container, your server can write characters and chapter recaps for books the community database hasn’t covered. Some hours later the book’s Characters and Recaps tabs appear in the player.

If you like, the Bridge then offers them to the community at meta.audiosilo.app, so every other server gets them too.

How it works

The Bridge transcribes the book (or reads its ebook), has an AI agent pick out the people and events, checks the result for mistakes and spoilers, and saves it with the book. You only see what you’ve reached, as with the community’s recaps.

What it needs

• A Bridge, version 0.3.0 or later, paired and online, with its agent container and a credential: a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, or an Anthropic or OpenAI API key. See Running a Bridge.
• Community metadata switched on (it is by default).
• A library the Bridge can write to. Results go in a hidden .audiosilo folder in the book’s folder; your audio is never touched.
• An admin account to start it. Everyone who can listen to the book sees the results.

The book doesn’t need a community match, an ASIN or an ISBN.

Generating a book

1. On the book’s page in the console, press Generate characters and recaps on the Community metadata card. (Admins see the same button in the player.)
2. Read the confirmation: whether it reads the audio or the ebook beside it (much quicker), how long transcription should take, and an Agent cost estimate.
3. Confirm. The page shows the current step, progress and time left. You can close it; the Bridge carries on.

Generate for the series, on a series card in Library > Series, queues every book without recaps in reading order.

Part	Cost
Transcription	Only time. Runs on the Bridge, or on a faster computer as an ASR worker (from Bridge 0.4.0 the Workers tab gives one line to install it; see Running a worker)
The agent	The only cost. Capped by default at $100 a month across all books and $75 a book, both adjustable. A job that reaches a cap pauses rather than failing

What you get

• Characters and Recaps tabs, and the companion’s Who’s who and Story so far, marked Generated on this server.
• A short, spoiler-free description, from the opening chapters only, shown in About when nothing else describes the book. It stays on your server.
• Chapters for a single file that has none, found where the narrator reads each heading. They arrive hours before the recaps. Detect chapters on the Health page does just this, with no agent cost.

The community’s always comes first. Once it has a book’s characters and recaps, yours step aside but stay in the book’s folder.

Sharing with the community

Everything stays on your server unless you send it. To be able to:

1. Sign the Bridge in to GitHub on its Accounts tab.
2. Turn on the Contributions module under Server > Settings > Modules.

A book’s page in the console then offers:

• Also contribute to the community, in the Generate dialog, on by default.
• Share with the community, for a book you generated and kept local. Nothing is generated again, so the agent costs nothing.
• Suggest corrections, when your edits to a matched book’s title, author, narrator, series, published date or ISBN differ from the community’s.

Each submission becomes an issue on the community’s GitHub repositories under your GitHub name, and is reviewed before it’s merged. Nothing about your listeners, your library or your other books is sent.

Good to know

• Players: the Generate button, the Generated on this server mark and the description need the web player bundled with your server (/web) or app 2.4.0. Older apps show the tabs only for books matched to the community. Chapters a Bridge finds reach older apps too.
• Sharing characters and recaps needs the book to be matched to a community entry.
• Corrections: some, such as a title, apply automatically once checked; others wait for a maintainer.
• Licences: characters and recaps are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0, corrections as CC0, like the rest of the database.

More

See Generating characters and recaps, Contributing from your server and The Bridge, including Share with the community and Suggest corrections. To fix a book’s details by hand first, see Fix covers and series.