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A viewer watches a walkthrough whose commands and screenshots match the version she just installed. This is the use case DeckTalk is built around. A tutorial goes stale the week the API it teaches changes, and re-recording it costs a day, so most authors stop making them. In DeckTalk the whole video is text and code, so a change to the library is a change to a few lines, and only the sections whose words changed are voiced again.

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What a viewer gets

  • Every reveal starts on the word that names it, so a command appears as the voice says it and nothing is read ahead.
  • The commands and the screenshots on screen are the ones the project rendered on the day it was built, not the ones an author remembered while recording.
  • Captions, chapters and a transcript page come out of the same build, so a viewer can read the walkthrough instead of watching it.
  • A section that shows a terminal or an editor can be a screen recording instead of a page, cut and mixed with the same narration.

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What the author writes

Four files hold the whole tutorial. A code slide is markup. An equation is a data-tex attribute typeset by the KaTeX files the wheel carries. A screenshot is a file the page loads, and decktalk screenshots writes one PNG per slide so the author can read what the recorder will see.

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The workflow

1

Start a tutorial project

decktalk init --example tutorial writes the four files, the runtime and the skills. Add --no-skills to leave the skills out.
2

Build it without voice

decktalk build --no-voice runs the five stages, which are narrate, align, record, assemble and verify. It writes placeholder narration, so it spends nothing and needs no key.
3

Place the cues

decktalk align resolves each cue phrase to a second on its section clock, and decktalk verify reports every reveal that landed late, early or not at all.
4

Plan the spend, then voice it

decktalk preflight freezes every reveal and estimates the takes without spending a credit, and decktalk narrate --dry-run prints the characters and the dollars a voiced run would cost.
5

Rebuild one section when the library changes

Edit the sentence, the slide or the cue, then run decktalk build --only 4. A section whose words did not change keeps its take, so it is never voiced twice.
Read Quickstart for the first build, Your first deck for one section written end to end, and Slide recipes for the slides a tutorial needs most.

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On a locked-down machine

A tutorial author inside a company meets two real conditions. A cloud speech service receives the script, and the first run downloads a browser and a media tool. What leaves your machine names every host and every request body, and Requirements and costs covers the package index mirror, the browser path and the cache directory that a managed machine needs. A build with --no-voice contacts no service at all, so a finished video can exist before any approval does.

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Also fits

Internal presentations, estimation and interview prep run the same pipeline, and none of them has a shipped example yet. The two use cases with worked examples beside this one are product demos and lessons.