Rostra 0.1.2

Rostra 0.1.2

Fixed

• Rostra starts in seconds again instead of stalling with an empty menu.
  When the system's audio was busy, opening the audio device could hold up
  startup for the better part of a minute — during which the menu bar showed
  "Engine: connecting…" and the Voice menu stayed empty. Rostra now starts
  without waiting on the audio device and attaches it on the first read.
• The app could start half-dead: empty Voice menu, gray icon, hotkey not
  responding. One internal fault at startup silently stopped every
  background-to-UI update in the app while playback kept working, which made
  it look like several unrelated bugs. Menus now reload their content instead
  of being carried across rebuilds, and a menu that ever comes up empty
  refills itself within a second.

Changed

• Rostra's log file no longer grows without limit. It is now capped, keeping
  recent history and discarding the oldest, so a long-running install cannot
  slowly fill the disk. Reads also record more about how they went, so a problem
  reported after the fact can be traced instead of guessed at.
• The French-timbre voice is now labelled "French (Accent)" in the Voice
  menu. "French" previously appeared twice meaning two different things — a
  French-sounding English voice nested under English, and the actual French
  language listed separately.

Added

• Units are read as units, not spelled out. 15 MW, 12 µm, 10 kΩ and
  thousands of other combinations are now spoken correctly without each one
  having to be added by hand — where before kW worked and MW did not.
  Heights and sizes written with prime marks are read as measurements at last —
  5'11" is "five feet eleven inches" and 12" is "twelve inches", where every
  other text-to-speech tool we tested reads them as silent pauses. Coordinates
  come through as coordinates (12°34'56"), and quoted text is left alone.
  Throughput and rates read the way they are meant: "35 tok/s" is tokens per
  second, "72 bpm" is beats per minute, "30 psi" is pounds per square inch, and
  a data rate now tells bits from bytes correctly. Dimensions read as
  dimensions — "9x13" is "nine by thirteen".
  Compound rates read properly too (50 N/m² → "newtons per square metre"),
  ranges say "five to ten kilometres" instead of running the numbers together,
  9.8 m/s² says "per second squared", blood pressure reads "one twenty over
  eighty millimetres of mercury", and 1/2 cup is "half a cup". Compass
  bearings stay bearings: 95°W is west, while 60 W is watts.

Fixed

• Rostra reads exactly what you highlighted in code editors and chat panels.
  In some apps a read could pick up far more than the selection — surrounding
  interface text and whole neighbouring messages — and speak that instead. The
  selection is now cross-checked before it is read, and anything that does not
  match falls back to a method that captures the highlight precisely.
• "Open at Login" now works on macOS. It was silently never taking effect
  — and the option was hidden, so there was no way to tell. Toggling it on now
  reliably adds Rostra to System Settings → Login Items (macOS asks once for
  permission to do so), and if anything stops that, Rostra opens the Login
  Items pane and says what to click instead of failing quietly.
• Rostra no longer freezes for half a minute and goes silent after audio
  devices change. Starting a read could stall ~31 seconds and then silently
  do nothing when the system's audio device was asleep or mid-switch (seen with
  and without Bluetooth headphones). The app now only re-opens the audio device
  when the device list has actually changed, caps how long a re-open may take,
  and shows "Audio device unavailable — try again" instead of failing silently.

Rostra 0.1.1

Added

• Rostra reads Bible scriptures the way a person would. Turn on Scripture
  Preset in Additional Settings — free tier — and verse numbers become
  landmarks instead of interruptions: announced when a verse begins a sentence,
  passed over silently when it lands mid-sentence, because a sentence in
  scripture routinely runs across several verses. References are spoken the way
  a person says them, and it works on text copied straight from the Bible sites
  people actually use.

  Off by default: the same "[1]" that marks a verse here marks a footnote in an
  academic paper.

• The Voice menu now tells you which voice is selected. It reads
  "Voice (Hazel — American English)" rather than just "Voice", so your current
  choice is visible at a glance instead of two submenus down.

• Speeds and rates are read as rates. "9.8 m/s" is spoken as metres per
  second, instead of reading the slash aloud. Prices like "$500/m" still mean
  per month.

Fixed

• Seven pronunciations reported from real use — durations, rates,
  abbreviations, and words whose correct reading depends on the sentence around
  them.

Rostra 0.1.0

Rostra 0.1.0

Words that are spelled the same but said differently are now read correctly.

"Play the record" and "Let me record it" no longer sound the same.
Neither do content, read, close, wind, present, object, desert,
progress, separate, permit, estimate and dozens more. Rostra now reads
each one the way the sentence means it.

Before this release, every one of these words had a single fixed pronunciation,
so roughly half of their appearances were wrong — and they turn up constantly in
articles, documentation, and email. Rostra changes a reading only when the
sentence makes the meaning clear; anything ambiguous keeps the reading it always
had, so nothing that sounded right before sounds different now.

Rostra is also faster. The engine that turns text into speech has been
rebuilt from the ground up. Reading starts sooner, long documents finish
quicker, and the app is lighter on your machine.

Everything still happens on your own computer. Nothing is sent anywhere.