Church Cap v.0.3.0 Public Preview

Release Summary
v.0.3.0 is a major public preview update focused on multilingual accessibility, safer operator workflows, better live-caption stability, and GitHub-ready documentation.

Highlights:

• Local live captions from a church sound desk/audio interface using Whisper or Faster Whisper.
• Visitor QR caption page with searchable languages, translated captions, transcript view, font controls, theme controls, and stable mobile loading states.
• Multilingual translation modes: Off, Base / Argos, Core / SMaLL-100, and Auto.
• Operator dashboard improvements for language resources, performance tuning, audio input, system status, diagnostics, updates, privacy, and sensitive moments.
• Performance controls are locked while captions are running to protect the live feed.
• Privacy-focused transcript retention, encrypted local cache where available, sensitive moment transcript barriers, and operator-only exports.
• GitHub-ready docs, setup guides, legal notes, third-party notices, issue templates, security policy, and CI workflow.

Church Cap v0.2.3 public preview

Church Cap v0.2.3 public preview

This release improves support and release readiness for Mac and Windows users.

Highlights:

• Added System > Diagnostics on the operator page.
• Diagnostics now include system specs, OS version, performance settings, hardware status, metrics, and redacted updater/CUDA logs.
• Added visible warnings and confirmation text before sharing diagnostics files.
• Improved Windows CUDA troubleshooting and force reinstall guidance.
• Updated README, Start Here, Blueprint, privacy docs, and GitHub templates.
• Added safeguards so diagnostics exports are not accidentally committed.
• Verified tests, Python/JS syntax, shell scripts, junk-file scan, and personal-path scan.

Church Cap v0.2.2 public preview

Church Cap v0.2.2 public preview

This update adds a new Performance section to the operator dashboard with a speed-vs-accuracy slider, Easy/Advanced settings, OS-aware Mac/Windows controls, live benchmarking, and offline recommended settings. Recommendations now choose conservative live-service defaults, while heavier models such as medium.en remain available for manual testing after benchmarking.
Windows GPU support has been tightened with better CUDA detection, cuDNN checks, CUDA troubleshooting controls, and a force reinstall flow for local NVIDIA runtime wheels inside .venv. The app now avoids recommending OpenAI Whisper/PyTorch CUDA paths on Windows when the built-in CUDA helper is intended for Faster Whisper/CTranslate2.

This release also improves live-caption stability by trimming obvious repeated word or phrase loops, adds individual QR code download buttons, adds a live performance tile, improves update-page wording, and refreshes documentation for the current Mac and Windows setup flow.

Highlights
• Added operator Performance panel with slider presets from fastest to most accurate.
• Added Easy and Advanced performance settings.
• Added Mac/Windows platform selection with auto-detection.
• Added Windows CUDA troubleshooting and force reinstall button.
• Added offline benchmark and live performance monitor.
• Added offline “Apply recommended” settings with safer live-service defaults.
• Added medium.en model option with latency warnings.
• Added individual QR code download buttons.
• Added performance status tile beside the live captions feed.
• Improved repeated word/phrase cleanup for live captions and transcripts.
• Improved Windows CUDA/runtime detection, including cuDNN DLL checks.
• Updated documentation, examples, and release hygiene for public GitHub publishing.

Notes
• Windows CUDA support uses Faster Whisper/CTranslate2 runtime packages, not PyTorch/OpenAI Whisper CUDA.
• Medium model is available, but should be benchmarked before live use.
• PowerShell scripts should be tested on Windows before tagging the final release, since they cannot be executed from the Mac-side development environment.

Church Cap v0.2.1 public preview

Church Cap v0.2.1 public preview

This release focuses on safer app updates and release cleanup after v0.2.0.

Highlights:

• Corrected the feedback email to info@churchcap.org.
• Added an operator-page Updates section for checking GitHub releases.
• Added up-to-date messaging, update confirmation, restart overlay, and reconnect polling.
• Changed macOS and Windows update scripts to update the current folder in place.
• Added ZIP checks, required-file validation, version validation, SHA-256 checksum verification, rollback backups, and automatic rollback on failed replacement.
• Preserved local files during updates, including .env, .venv, .git, data/, logs/, certs/, glossary, and profanity-filter config.
• Improved Updates page spacing and formatting.
• Updated README, quick-start docs, blueprint, generated PDF, and GitHub release copy.

Notes:
This remains an early public preview. AI captions and translations may be inaccurate, and churches remain responsible for their own accessibility, safeguarding, privacy, copyright, data-protection, and transcript-retention policies.

Church Cap v0.2.0 public preview

Church Cap v0.2.0 public preview

This release focuses on caption readability, session transcript handling, privacy controls, and a more polished phone/tablet viewing experience.

Highlights

• Improved live caption layout for audience devices.
• Captions now read more naturally from left to right and scroll upward.
• Improved phone and tablet landscape layout.
• Live captions use more of the screen when the transcript panel is hidden.
• Added a translated button on the client page to show or hide the session transcript.
• Added a scrollable session transcript with timestamps, newest captions shown first.
• Added subtle spacing and layout refinements for mobile, landscape phones, and tablets.
• Removed the old fill-box caption view because it was not producing useful behaviour.
• Switched the default transcription backend to standard OpenAI Whisper for better accuracy and consistency.
• Retained faster-whisper as an optional backend for lower-latency setups.
• Added centralised app version handling so operator and client pages display the same version number.
• Added automatic light/dark theme detection based on the device system theme, with local manual override support.

Transcript and privacy improvements

• Added server-backed current-session transcript history.
• Added timestamped transcript entries for audience review during a live session.
• Added encrypted-at-rest local transcript caching when the required encryption dependency is available.
• Transcript cache is stored in the user’s app data folder rather than the project folder.
• Added transcript retention metadata and startup pruning so old transcript files are cleaned according to the saved retention setting.
• New app sessions start with a fresh visible transcript instead of showing the previous service transcript.
• Added operator controls to open the local transcript storage folder.
• Added current-session transcript export in TXT, VTT, SRT, and JSON formats.
• Added an export warning because transcripts may contain personal, sensitive, pastoral, copyrighted, or inaccurate content.
• Strengthened Sensitive Moment mode so captions spoken while it is active are discarded and are not retained in the transcript or exports.
• Added Whisper buffer clearing around Sensitive Moment mode to reduce delayed private captions appearing after captions resume.

Operator and documentation updates

• Updated operator dashboard controls for transcript visibility, export, retention, and transcript folder access.
• Updated setup, quick-start, architecture, privacy/security, translation, and project blueprint documentation.
• Regenerated the user quick-start PDF for v0.2.0.
• Cleaned generated files and checked static assets before release.

Notes

This is still an early public preview for testing and pilot church use. AI captions and translations may be inaccurate. Churches remain responsible for their own accessibility, safeguarding, privacy, copyright, data-protection, and transcript-retention policies.

Transcript export can be useful for accessibility review, sermon notes, safeguarding review, or pastoral follow-up, but it should only be used where the church has a clear lawful and ethical reason to keep or share the transcript.

Church Cap v0.1.1 public preview

Fixes Windows/macOS setup when .env.example is missing from downloaded source archives by adding a visible env.example fallback and updating setup/start scripts to use it.

Church Cap v0.1.0 public preview

Church Cap v0.1.0 public preview

First public preview of Church Cap, a local-first live captions app for churches designed to support people who are Deaf or have hearing impairments.

Church Cap takes audio from a church sound desk or USB audio interface, transcribes speech locally with Whisper, and lets visitors read live captions by scanning a QR code.

Highlights

• Local Whisper transcription using faster-whisper.
• QR-code audience caption page.
• Password-protected operator dashboard.
• Audio input selection.
• OBS browser-source support.
• Sensitive moment blank/pause mode.
• Optional local Argos Translate support.
• Bad-word censor for likely speech-to-text mistakes.
• macOS setup/start scripts.
• Windows setup/start scripts.
• Optional NVIDIA CUDA runtime setup on Windows.
• Quick-start guide and PDF documentation.

Notes

This is an early public preview for testing and pilot church use. AI captions and translations may be inaccurate. Churches remain responsible for their own accessibility, safeguarding, privacy, copyright, and data-protection policies.