What does it cost?
You need an ElevenLabs plan with API access. The free tier has the API, but its audio carries a watermark and a non-commercial license, so the Starter plan is the practical floor. A ten-minute narration is roughly 9,000 characters, which fits inside that plan’s monthly allowance. Because DeckTalk caches sections by text, an edit costs the sentences you changed rather than the whole script. Everything else is free. Chromium and ffmpeg run on your machine, and--silent builds spend nothing.
Am I locked into ElevenLabs?
ElevenLabs is the only provider today because it returns a timestamp for every word. The provider is one module behind a two-method protocol, and anything that returns word times can take its place. A local text-to-speech engine with a forced aligner is the obvious candidate. The--silent flag needs no provider at all, so the project format
does not depend on any vendor.
How does the voice sound?
Any ElevenLabs voice id works, including a clone of your own. Stability, similarity, style, and speed are settings under[voice] in decktalk.toml. DeckTalk sends the
previous and next text with each section so that the prosody stays continuous across
cuts.
Why not record the screen?
You would record it again after every edit, and you would re-time every reveal by hand. Here an edit rebuilds one section, and the reveals follow the words wherever they move.Do I have to use generated music?
No. The soundscape stays off until[mix] names a file, and you can bring your own
files. The soundscape command exists for when you want ElevenLabs to make the bed and
the effects from a prompt.
How is this different from Remotion, Descript, or Synthesia?
Remotion and Motion Canvas are for timing visuals by frame in code. Descript is for editing a recording you already made. Synthesia and HeyGen put an avatar on screen. DeckTalk is for the case where the timing should come from the words and the slides are yours.Can I use my own HTML framework?
Yes. A page is any HTML that honors the page contract. The runtime is one file with no dependencies, and it adds nothing to your markup beyond the stage element. KaTeX is optional.Does it run on Windows?
Yes. The test suite and a full offline build run on Linux, macOS, and Windows in CI for every push tomain.