A Tour of Your Tonfolk Account: Profiles, Favourites, and Custom Casts

Tonfolk started as a place to find out which AI voice fits which book. That part still does most of the heavy lifting, and you do not need an account to use it. But over the last few months Tonfolk has grown into something a little more personal: a profile you can share, a way to save the books you actually want to hear, and a tool for building full voice casts for any book in the catalogue.

If you have signed up recently, here is what your account actually unlocks. If you have been around for a while, this is a quick tour of everything that has shipped.

Your Public Handle

The first thing you do after signing up is pick a username. This is your public name on Tonfolk and it shows up in three places: on your profile page at /u/<your-handle>, on every cast you publish, and on the community casts strip on the homepage.

A handle is three to twenty four lowercase characters: letters, numbers, hyphens, or underscores, starting with a letter. Pick something memorable. You can change it later, but only once every sixty days, so it pays to choose deliberately the first time.

Your account settings live at /account. That is also where you change your password (for email users) or delete your account (for everyone).

Save the Books You Want to Hear

On any book page in the catalogue, there is a heart button. Tap it once and the book is added to your favourites. Tap it again to remove it. Favourites are public, they show up as the first row on your profile, so other listeners can see what you have been earmarking.

This is useful in two directions. For you, it is a queue: the books you want to come back to, the ones you have not picked a voice for yet, the ones you want to remember next time you have a long drive coming up. For other people, browsing your profile gives them a sense of your taste without you having to write a bio.

If you want to start building a list, browse the catalogue and tap the heart on anything that catches your eye.

Build a Cast for Any Book

This is the most distinctive thing you can do with a Tonfolk account, and it is worth understanding properly.

A "cast" is a full set of voice picks for a single book: one voice per character, plus an optional narrator. Casts work the way a director might cast a film. You read through the character list, audition voices on the fly, and lock in your choices. The result is a public page that anyone can open, listen to, and use as a reference for their own listening.

There are a few reasons to build one:

You finished a book and you have opinions. You know who the protagonist sounds like in your head, and the obvious AI voice does not match. Build the cast you would have wanted.
You are about to listen and you want to plan. ElevenLabs Studio and Fish Audio Story Studio both let you assign different voices to different characters. A Tonfolk cast is the planning document you take into either of those tools.
You want to argue. Casts are public. If your cast for a popular book gets traction, other listeners will publish theirs as alternatives. The conversations in the comments of a cast page are some of the most fun on the platform.

If none of those sound like you yet, here are a few prompts that tend to unlock something:

Ever wanted a fully queer cast for a male-dominated classic? Two centuries of Frankenstein have been read by stage-trained baritones. Nothing is stopping you from casting the voices you would actually want to hear.
What does Pride and Prejudice sound like if Mrs. Bennet has a working-class accent and Darcy is younger than every audiobook narrator has ever made him?
The one thriller you loved was wrecked by its narrator. Who would you have cast instead?
A book where every named character is male. What changes if you swap half of them for women, with no other modification?
The classic you reread every year. The inner voice in your head sounds nothing like the official audiobook. Cast the inner voice.
A YA fantasy with a fifteen-year-old protagonist read by a fifty-year-old narrator with no edge. What would you do differently?

The point is that a cast is not a recommendation. It is a thing you make because you have a specific listening experience in mind, and no publisher has shipped it. The catalogue (over 600 voices across ElevenLabs and Fish Audio) is wide enough that some version of what you want almost certainly exists.

To build one, open any book detail page (try Frankenstein or any other book in the catalogue) and click "Build a cast" in the Community Casts tier. The composer walks you through every named character. You can audition voices, swap them around, save as a draft if you are not done, and publish when you are ready.

Drafts stay private on your profile until you publish them. Published casts appear on three surfaces: your own profile, the book's Community Casts tier, and the "Recent community casts" strip on the homepage.

Suggest Voices and Books We Are Missing

The cast composer is also where the catalogue grows. While casting a character, if you cannot find the voice you have in mind, you can suggest one in two ways:

Search and pick. Type a voice name and pick from the existing catalogue. If it is there, it is one click away.
Paste a URL. Drop in an ElevenLabs or Fish Audio voice URL. Tonfolk validates it against the platform's API, fetches the preview, and queues the voice for review. Approved voices land in the catalogue and become available to every other listener.

The same holds for books. Anywhere the search comes up empty (the homepage search, the book browser), there is a "suggest a book" form. Send the title and author. Approved suggestions get imported with full metadata.

You can track every voice and book suggestion you have made at /my-suggestions. Each one shows a status (pending, approved, imported, rejected) so you know whether you can already start using it in a cast.

Your Profile, Other People's Profiles

Your profile at /u/<your-handle> is your public face on Tonfolk. It shows your favourites, your published casts, and the date you joined. Drafts are visible only to you and live in their own section under your published work.

Other people's profiles work the same way. If a particular cast catches your eye on a book page or on the homepage, click through to the author's profile and see what else they have been listening to. This is the closest thing Tonfolk has to a follow graph: you do not subscribe to people directly, but you can follow taste through the books and casts they share.

Sign Up Options

You can sign up two ways. Email and password is the standard option, with a confirmation link sent to your inbox. Google OAuth is a one-click alternative and pulls in your profile picture so your avatar is set automatically.

Either way, the first thing after sign in is the handle picker on /auth/welcome. After that you are on the homepage and everything above is unlocked.

If you forget your password, the forgot password flow sends a reset link to your email. The link is single-use and expires in an hour.

What Is Not Here Yet

A few things are deliberately scoped out for the first version:

You cannot follow other users directly. Right now your only feed is the homepage. A follow graph is on the roadmap but not in the product yet.
Casts cannot be exported. A cast lives on Tonfolk. Copying it into ElevenLabs Studio or Fish Audio Story Studio is still manual. We are watching to see how often this is a real pain point.
Suggested voices and books are reviewed manually. Anything you suggest goes into a queue and is added to the catalogue once approved. There is no instant publish path for user-submitted content.

If any of these would matter to your listening, the best thing you can do is build a cast and use the comments to tell us which constraint hurts most.

Where to Start

If you have not signed up yet, the fastest way to see all of this is to create an account, pick a handle, and favourite three books. The rest unfolds from there.

If you already have an account, the move is to build a cast for the book you most recently finished. Take fifteen minutes, audition a voice for each character, and publish it. That single action is what the platform is actually for.

Create your Tonfolk account and start building casts