How to Turn a Manhua Into an Audio Drama With AI

A manhua is a Chinese comic, and if you read them you already know the shape of the problem. The series you follow is four hundred chapters long, the official app has no audio, and the fan-favourite arc you want to hear on a commute exists only as a stack of vertical images with the dialogue burned into the artwork. There is no audiobook, and there probably never will be one.

You can make the audio version yourself. Not by feeding pages into a machine that reads pictures -- nothing does that well -- but by turning the chapter into a speaker-tagged script first, then handing that script to a tool that assigns a distinct voice to every character and renders it as an audio drama. That is what this guide walks through, and it is the same path we built AudioProducer for.

Start with the honest constraint: the text has to come out of the panels

AudioProducer reads EPUB files and pasted text. It does not read lettering off a panel image, and any tool that claims it does will hand you garbled sound effects, mis-ordered bubbles, and character names spelled three different ways. So step one is transcription, and it is the step that decides whether the finished audio is good.

Transcribing a manhua chapter is faster than it sounds. A typical vertical-scroll chapter carries between forty and ninety spoken lines. Read the chapter in reading order, and for each bubble type the speaker name, a colon, and the line. Skip the decorative sound effects for now -- those become production choices later, not dialogue.

Reading order: manhua is not manga, and the two break differently

Manga is traditionally read right-to-left, and transcription errors there come from flipping panel order. Modern manhua is overwhelmingly webtoon-style: one continuous vertical strip, read top to bottom, one beat per scroll. That is easier to transcribe correctly, but it creates a different trap.

Vertical strips use whitespace as timing. A long empty gap between two panels is a pause -- a beat before the reveal, a held silence after a line lands. When you transcribe, that gap vanishes, and the audio reads the two lines back to back at conversational speed, which flattens the moment the artist built. Mark those gaps as you go. A simple [pause] in your script is enough to remind you to insert a beat later.

Names, titles, and the localisation decisions you cannot skip

This is where manhua audio gets genuinely harder than an English-language comic, and where most attempts fall apart.

Chinese names carry information that the audio has to preserve. A character addressed as Shixiong (senior martial brother) in one panel and by given name in the next is signalling a shift in formality that matters to the scene. If your transcription silently normalises everything to a given name, the relationship arc disappears from the audio.

Decide three things before you record anything, and write them at the top of your script:

• Pinyin or translated titles. Keep Shixiong and Shizun, or use "senior brother" and "master"? Both are defensible. Pick one and hold it for the whole series -- switching mid-arc is the thing listeners notice.
• Name order. Chinese names are family-name-first. If your source translation flipped them, flip them back or do not, but be consistent, because the voice model will pronounce them as written.
• Sect and technique names. These repeat constantly in cultivation-flavoured series. Fix the spelling once so every chapter renders the same way.

If the source series is a cultivation or wuxia title, the prose adaptations are worth a look too -- we cover the novel side of that audience in our guides to cultivation and xianxia audiobooks and wuxia audiobooks. The vocabulary decisions are identical; only the source format differs.

Build the script in speaker-tagged form

Your transcription should end up looking like a radio script, not like prose. Something close to this:

NARRATOR: The sect gates had not opened in three hundred years.
LI WEN: You are certain this is the place?
SHEN QIAO: [pause] I am certain of nothing anymore.
NARRATOR: [sfx: distant stone grinding]

The narrator line is doing real work. Manhua carries enormous amounts of information visually -- a location, a time skip, a character's expression -- that has no spoken equivalent. You need a narrator to carry those, but sparingly. One or two lines of scene-setting per major beat is plenty; a narrator who describes every panel turns a forty-minute chapter into two hours and kills the pace. Our walkthrough on scripting a webtoon goes deeper on where narration earns its place.

Cast the voices

Paste the script into a new AudioProducer project as a chapter, then run Auto-Assign Characters. The AI reads the speaker tags, builds the character list, and proposes a voice for each one. You then open the Characters panel and adjust.

Manhua casts are large -- a mid-tier series can run twenty named characters in a single arc -- so the practical advice is to cast the voices that carry the arc properly and let the rest sit on sensible defaults. What you are protecting against is two characters who appear in the same scene sounding alike. Listeners forgive a generic voice; they do not forgive not knowing who is talking.

One more casting decision specific to this format: the narrator should sound clearly outside the cast. If your narrator shares a register with a protagonist, every scene-setting line reads as an internal monologue, and readers lose the frame.

Sound, and what to do with the sound effects drawn into the art

Manhua letterers draw sound effects as artwork -- the impact, the sword draw, the crash. Do not read those aloud. A narrator saying "boom" is comedy, and not the kind you wanted.

Run Auto-Assign Sounds and then treat those drawn effects as cues rather than lines. Where the art shouts, place an actual sound from the library, or upload your own into your sound library and use it across every chapter of the series. You can also set an intro sound for the project and a chapter intro sound, which is the cheapest possible way to make a long-running series feel like a produced show rather than a stack of files. If you are working on the visual side as well, adding sound to a webtoon covers the same material from the other direction.

Render, then check the two things that actually go wrong

Generate the audio and listen to the first three minutes before you render the rest of the arc. Two failures show up almost every time on a first pass, and both are cheap to fix:

• A name pronounced wrong. Because names repeat hundreds of times across a series, one bad pronunciation is a hundred bad moments. Adjust the spelling in the script to steer it phonetically and re-render.
• Two characters too close in timbre. Easiest to catch in a dialogue-heavy scene. Swap one voice, re-render that chapter only.

Each chapter can be downloaded as its own audio file, which is what you want for a serialised comic -- the chapter boundary is already the natural episode boundary, and you end up with a series you can actually navigate instead of one four-hour file.

What this costs in words, not dollars

AudioProducer meters by words per month. A transcribed manhua chapter usually lands between 700 and 1,500 words, because comic dialogue is sparse compared to prose -- a full novel chapter is three to five times as long. That means a comic series stretches a word allowance considerably further than a novel does.

The free account gives 1,200 words a month with no credit card and no expiry, which is enough to put one real chapter through end to end and hear whether your casting works before you commit to an arc. Paid plans start at 7,000 words a month and go up to 100,000 for a serious back-catalogue pass.

If you want to see how the same workflow applies to other comic formats, the full guide index collects every walkthrough we have published, including the webtoon and motion-comic variants that share most of these steps.

Pick one chapter -- not the first one, the one you would re-read -- transcribe it tonight, and hear your sect argue out loud by morning. Start a free AudioProducer project and cast it.