Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
github-actions[bot] edited this page Jun 27, 2026 · 130 revisions

Candela wiki

Current version: v1.2.0 Candela is TechEmpower's accessible resource app. Browse free tech guides, connect with our peer-support Discord, dial 211 for local help — and listen to any of it through a neural-voice audiobook engine that reads everything aloud.

Under the hood: twenty-five fiction backends (Royal Road, GitHub, RSS / Atom feeds, local EPUB folders, local PDF files, on-device OCR, self-hosted Outline wikis, Memory Palace, Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, Archive of Our Own, Standard Ebooks, Wikipedia, Wikisource, Radio with 30k+ stations, Notion, Hacker News, arXiv, PLOS, Discord, Telegram, Palace Project, Slack, Matrix, Readability web articles); three in-process voice families (Piper, Kokoro, KittenTTS) with optional Azure HD cloud voices; AI chat per fiction across seven LLM providers with cross-fiction memory, function calling, and multi-modal image input; built for Android phones, tablets, and Wear OS.

📦 Latest release: v1.2.0 — Play Store ready — Supertonic 3 TTS engine, collapsing headers, chapter previews, DND sleep timer, and Play Store compliance polish.

📖 Source: github.com/techempower-org/candela · License: GPL-3.0 · Site: candela.techempower.org

Pages

What's new in v1.2.0

Play Store ready. Supertonic 3 TTS engine, collapsing headers, chapter previews, DND sleep timer, and Play Store compliance polish.

  • Supertonic 3 TTS engine. Third in-process voice family via VoxSherpa v2.9.0 — wires SupertonicEngine into EnginePlayer's dispatch table with sample-rate cache, render-job support, and catalog integration. (#1191 / #1205)
  • Collapsing headers. Library and Browse screens now collapse their title bars on scroll for more content space, with smooth spring animations. (#1195 / #1213)
  • Chapter content previews. Chapter list entries show a snippet of the chapter body text, giving a quick preview before opening. (#1189 / #1201)
  • Auto-enable Do Not Disturb with sleep timer. When the sleep timer activates, Candela can optionally enable DND to silence notifications. (#1190 / #1199)
  • Confirm before destructive sign-out. Cloud sync sign-out now shows a confirmation dialog to prevent accidental data loss. (#1197 / #1200)
  • Report objectionable content. Settings → About now includes a "Report objectionable content" mailto link for App Store compliance. (#1140 / #1188)
  • User-Agent centralized. All 16 source modules now send a descriptive Candela/<version> User-Agent instead of OkHttp's default, improving API compliance and debugging. (#1141 / #1196, #1204 / #1215)
  • Supertonic voices gated. Supertonic 3 voices are hidden from the catalog until the engine is present, preventing "engine not found" errors. (#1202 / #1209)
  • uriHandler.openUri guards. Two more unguarded openUri calls wrapped in try-catch to prevent crashes on devices without a default browser. (#1203 / #1207)
  • Radio ExoPlayer position sampling. ExoPlayer position polling now runs on the main looper, fixing a threading assertion on some devices. (#1192 / #1206)
  • AO3 politeness gate. Archive of Our Own requests are now rate-limited to 1 req/sec with honest compliance documentation. (#1141 / #1193)
  • Sync sign-out cleanup. InstantDB records are now deleted on sign-out instead of being orphaned. (#1139 / #1194)
  • Play Store feature graphic. Rebranded to Candela identity. (#1198 / #1212)
  • NoopDaos test fakes. Completed stale DAO fakes for epub-writer tests. (#1210)

Recent v0.5 highlights

  • Cold launch 6.7 s → 0.8 s on Galaxy Tab A7 Lite (v0.5.46 — R8 + Baseline Profile + isDebuggable=false).
  • Full PCM cache series — streaming-tee, cache-hit playback, background pre-render, Settings UI, status icons (v0.5.47–v0.5.49).
  • Twelve a11y findings closed (v0.5.43) — high-contrast brass-on-near-black theme, reduced-motion fold-in, TalkBack pacing.
  • Nav settled — four-tab dock {Playing · Library · Voices · Settings} (v0.5.50 final, after v0.5.40 restructure).
  • Cross-device InstantDB sync (v0.5.39+) — library, follows, positions, bookmarks, pronunciation, encrypted secrets.
  • KittenTTS lightest-tier voice family (v0.5.36 — #119).

Quick links

Candela

Start here

Using Candela

Developer

Project

Clone this wiki locally