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Candela wiki

Current version: v1.11.0 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: thirty-three 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: v1.11.0 — Somber Relic — The app now carries its own handbook, sources declare their settings, and the welcome tour replays on demand.

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

Pages

What's new in v1.11.0

Somber Relic. The app now carries its own handbook, sources declare their settings, and the welcome tour replays on demand.

  • In-app Candela Handbook — the user guide as a built-in, fully-offline source: Getting Started, per-source setup, voices, reader & teleprompter, sync & privacy, troubleshooting — every chapter narrated like any book. Compiled from the repo docs at build time and stamped with the app version so it can't drift. (#1544, #1561)
  • "Replay the welcome tour" — a findable row in Settings → About that reruns the first-launch wizard immediately, no restart needed (the old debug-only reset stays for QA). (#1558, #1559)
  • Per-source settings, declared not hand-wired — sources now declare their config fields (text / secret / URL) and Settings renders them generically; secrets stay on the encrypted store and are never echoed back. reddit's client id, Notion's token, and Prime Gaming's feed-URL override are the first riders. (#1531, #1535, #1553)
  • Source icons that stick — a source's declared Browse glyph is finally honored instead of falling back to the generic compass. (#1527, #1555)
  • Notion in Browse shows a proper "connected — pull to refresh" state on first fetch instead of a silent empty list. (#1511, #1552)
  • AO3 behind a Cloudflare WAF block (Error 1020) retries instead of wrongly demanding a sign-in. (#1502, #1541)
  • RSS chapters persist their bodies at refresh — tapping an item never re-fetches — and remember their feed even when its URL moves; refreshes no longer risk dropping read-state, bookmarks, or author notes. (#1497, #1498, #1547, #1549, #1554)
  • Voice-engine KSP no longer collides when two engines share a class name across packages. (#1506, #1546)
  • new-source.sh grew three scaffold modes — --local (on-device providers), --auth (credentialed), --xml (feeds, with parser errors kept inside the typed contract) — closing the gaps the source wave found. (#1526, #1529, #1533, #1548)
  • The contract kit now fails loudly on a mis-routed list path instead of false-greening. (#1523, #1551)
  • Voice testkit split into :core-voice-testkit — source-module test builds no longer drag in core-playback. (#1504, #1560)
  • Docs pass: README/microsite at 33 sources, new setup guides in the wiki sync, google-news on the contract kit. (#1491, #1543, #1550, #1557)

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

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Using Candela

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