v1.4.0 — The Host Finds Its Voice, and Close Enough Counts
v1.4.0 — The Host Finds Its Voice, and Close Enough Counts
Two big things happen in this release. The TV stops being a screen you read off and becomes a host that talks — reading the questions, naming the options, calling the winner, welcoming people as they sit down. And a whole new kind of question lands: not "which of these four," but "how close can you get?" Both have been waiting in the wings since 1.3.0; now they're on the table.
Pull up a chair — here's what's new.
🗣️ The TV becomes a real quiz master
Flip one switch in setup and your Home Assistant speaker takes over hosting duties. It reads each question aloud, runs through the options ("A, Paris… B, London…"), announces the right answer and who actually got it, calls out when someone takes the lead, welcomes each player as they join the lobby, and counts down when time's running low. Nobody has to read the screen anymore — you can keep your eyes on your friends instead of the TV, which turns out to be a real win for anyone who finds small text on a far-off screen hard going.
It's yours to shape. A master toggle turns the whole thing on or off, and underneath it sits a row of switches for each moment — want it to read questions but stay quiet on the standings? One tap. Pick which voice engine and which speaker it comes out of, right in the setup screen. It speaks German and English, matching whatever language the game is in. And it stays completely silent until you ask for it, so nothing changes for anyone who'd rather keep the room quiet.
🎯 How close can you get?
Not every question has an answer you can list. "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" "How many bones in the human body?" The new estimation round hands everyone a slider instead of four buttons, and you guess. The closest guess takes the points, the rest scale down by how near they landed, an exact hit earns a little bonus, and anyone who didn't guess gets nothing. The reveal is the best part: every player's guess plotted on a number line with the true value pinned, so you can see at a glance who was inches away and who was in another postcode — on both the phones and the TV.
Two packs come in the box to play with right away — Schätzfragen in German and Estimation in English, fifteen questions each, full of the kind of "wait, really?" numbers that start arguments. Your existing multiple-choice packs don't change at all; estimation simply slots in alongside them.
🔧 Polish and under the hood
The estimation type actually shipped quietly just after 1.3.0, and a few rough edges got sanded down on the way here: a cache fix so the new question type reaches phones that already had Quizify open, a render fix so the slider and its picture show up correctly on the very first question, and a guard that keeps estimation out of the frantic Lightning Round, where there's no room for a slider. The test suite got steadier too, with the last of some order-dependent flakiness ironed out so every future change lands on solid ground.
🙏 Thank you
Both of these grew straight out of games played at real tables — someone wishing the host didn't have to read every question, someone wanting a round where "close" was good enough. Keep the notes coming. The arguments over whose guess was closer are exactly the point.
A talking host · a brand-new guess-the-number round · two estimation packs · German + English narration