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Candela wiki

Current version: v1.2.1 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: v1.2.1 — v1.2.1 — Hotfix: radio and LibriVox audio streams now play immediately instead of showing a permanent "Retry" error.

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

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Pages

• Getting started — Install, sign-in, first listen
• Fiction sources — All twenty-five backends and their setup paths
• AI chat — Seven providers, grounding, recaps, sessions
• Voices — Piper, Kokoro, KittenTTS, Azure HD, voice library
• Voice catalog — Flat reference of all catalog entries
• Settings reference — Every knob explained
• Architecture — Thirty-eight modules, plugin seam, data flow
• Building from source — Toolchain, gradle, signing
• Troubleshooting — Sideload, voice download, BYOK setup, OAuth flow

What's new in v1.2.1

Hotfix: radio and LibriVox audio streams now play immediately instead of showing a permanent "Retry" error.

• Audio chapter race condition. Radio and LibriVox chapters now carry their stream URL from creation time via ChapterInfo.audioUrl, eliminating the race between ChapterDownloadWorker.setBody() and EnginePlayer.loadAndPlay() that caused permanent "Chapter not ready" errors. (#1221 / #1222)

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

• README
• Roadmap
• Open issues
• Releases
• GitHub Pages site