The reading order isn't a guess.
Neither is the voice.
Upload a chapter, and Castia reads every bubble in order — then keeps each character sounding like themselves, panel to panel. Currently in Beta.
Try it on a chapter“You're late again.”
“Traffic. Don't start.”
Reading order, detected
Bubble text, detected panel by panel
Each panel goes through Google Cloud Vision OCR, which detects every speech bubble's text and its position, so nothing needs to be manually transcribed before adaptation can start. A Chapter DNA pass then reads the whole chapter and builds a cast-and-tone profile — who's speaking, how each character speaks, the tone of each scene — so a character's voice stays consistent from the first panel to the last instead of being re-decided line by line with no memory of what came before.
Reading order is inferred from where each bubble sits, so the same detection pass handles a manga spread read right to left and a webtoon strip read top to bottom. Without a dedicated text-detector service configured, the fallback ordering is a plain top-to-bottom guess — this is one of the specific rough edges the Beta label refers to, not a general disclaimer.
A character's voice shouldn't reset every time they open their mouth.
Dialogue runs through the full Writers' Room
Once the dialogue is read, every line goes through the identical Translator → Creative Adapter → Judge pipeline the music side uses: a literal anchor, five creative rewrites, and a Judge that picks a winner and states its reason for departing from a literal reading — with the Chapter DNA cast profile injected into the prompt for each character's lines, so the same character's voice doesn't drift between their first line and their fifteenth. See the full mechanics on how it works.
What Beta actually means here
Save, collections, and share-links work the same way they do for music — that part isn't the Beta gap. Two things specifically aren't finished: sound-effect text drawn directly into the artwork isn't redrawn, only speech-bubble text is; and reading order falls back to a plain top-to-bottom guess unless a dedicated text-detector service is configured, as noted above. Both are tracked openly rather than smoothed over in the marketing.
Optional redraw & typeset
A redraw step can erase the original lettering from a panel - inpainting the artwork underneath it - and typeset the adapted line back in, sized and wrapped to fit the bubble. This is the same erase-and-reletter work a professional letterer does by hand; Castia automates it as an optional pass, not a replacement for a full professional pipeline on something high-stakes.
Publishers Weekly's 2023 reporting on freelance manga translators organizing over pay described rates in the neighborhood of $100-250 per chapter on weekly series — that's translation alone, before typesetting and lettering are factored in separately. At Starter-pack rates, a full page here — translated, redrawn, and typeset — runs about $3.50 (see pricing), which is why it's positioned as a fast first pass for high-volume work, not a professional pipeline replacement on something high-stakes. Full context on those industry figures is in what manga and webtoon localization actually costs.
Sources
- Publishers Weekly, "Manga Freelancers Say, 'Show Me the Money'" (April 26, 2023) — reported per-chapter freelance translation rates on weekly series
Working with song lyrics instead? See song lyric translation, or check the pricing and FAQ.