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Candela wiki

Current version: v1.1.3 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-one fiction backends (Royal Road, GitHub, RSS / Atom feeds, local EPUB folders, self-hosted Outline wikis, Memory Palace, Project Gutenberg, Archive of Our Own, Standard Ebooks, Wikipedia, Wikisource, Radio with 30k+ stations, Notion, Hacker News, arXiv, PLOS, Discord, Telegram, Palace Project, Slack, Matrix); 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: v1.1.3 — Mark the page — In-reader text highlighting.

📖 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-one 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-four modules, plugin seam, data flow
• Building from source — Toolchain, gradle, signing
• Troubleshooting — Sideload, voice download, BYOK setup, OAuth flow

What's new in v1.1.3

Mark the page. In-reader text highlighting.

• In-reader highlights. Long-press to select text in the reader, pick a color, and (optionally) attach a note — highlights persist and sync, and tapping a saved highlight lets you edit or remove it. (#1079 / #1088)
• The select→highlight gesture is verified by an on-device instrumented Compose test (HighlightGestureTest) alongside the 13 offset-mapping unit tests — a deterministic regression guard for the selection path.

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