Captions & narration cues

Cues are the narration layer of Storyboard. Each slide carries a script, and inline markers pin specific moments in the script to visual actions: trigger a sub-step, highlight a range, or reveal a hidden element. A marker is written as {@cueId} for a single point, or as a pair {@cueId:start} … {@cueId:end} for a range. In the cue editor those markers are drawn as coloured dots floating above the line rather than shown as raw text.

Three capabilities

1. Captions: scrolling subtitle at the bottom during TTS playback (toggleable).
2. Step reveals: a point marker {@cueId} inside the script triggers that cue's operations when the narration reaches it.
3. Range effects: a range marker {@cueId:start} … {@cueId:end} fires that cue's operations at the start; any of them marked as temporary — a highlight, a connecting line, a brief camera zoom-in, and so on — are automatically undone once the range ends.

Example script

Q3 GMV grew 38% YoY, {@2}driven mostly by East China.
{@3:start}The Yangtze Delta alone contributed 60%{@3:end}, a clear payoff on focused investment.

2 and 3 are the ids of cues defined on that slide. Everything outside the markers is plain text: it is read aloud verbatim and shown as the caption, so Markdown syntax has no effect there and would simply be spoken.

Playback timeline:

Follow along and seek

During playback the script lights up character by character in step with the voice — that highlight is the progress indicator. To replay from a particular line, click that character and playback resumes from there; there is no separate progress bar to hunt for.

Where cues come from

Cues are written by the AI as part of the storyboard document — you get the script and its markers together with the slides, not as a separate generation step.

Editing it yourself

The ✏️ button beside the narration opens edit mode, where you can rewrite it directly. You edit the clean text — internal notation like {@id} never shows up. Markers ride along with the words: insert text before a marker and it shifts right; delete a whole passage and any marker inside it lands at the start of the cut. The markers sit right on the line you are editing and move with every keystroke — and they look exactly as they do outside edit mode, so toggling the pencil never shifts the text by a pixel.

Marker positions are also drag-adjustable, to retime events (not while editing the text — the two are never live at once). When several markers sit at the same spot, dragging also reorders them — they spread out side by side; drop on a dot's left half to go before it, its right half to go after, and the insertion caret shows where it will land. While you drag, positions that won't accept the marker turn grey — marker order also decides the order operations run in, so the marker that creates a chart can't move past the one that highlights it, or playback would act on something that isn't there yet. The greyed-out region is what that constraint looks like.

Two things only the AI can do (just ask in chat):

• Adding a marker — e.g. "trigger something here too". It has to pick a cue, and the cue-to-operation mapping isn't something you should have to think about.
• Converting between point and range markers — e.g. "keep this highlight up until the end of these three sentences".

A hollow dot is inactive: its cue has no operations left (usually what a deleted widget leaves behind), so nothing happens when playback reaches it. Click it to clear it away.

Slide navigation is disabled while editing — switching pages would swap the text under you. Playback is not: pressing play leaves edit mode and starts reading, so you can hear a revision without closing the editor first. Conversely, editing is disabled during playback, since the word-by-word highlight would drift out of sync with text that is changing.

TTS and volume

Cues work with TTS (text-to-speech). The playback bar offers:

• Toggle captions on or off
• A mute button plus a continuous volume slider
• Play / pause / previous / next sentence

Next step

• Speaker persona
• Annotations