Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
github-actions[bot] edited this page Jun 29, 2026 · 130 revisions

Candela wiki

Current version: v1.5.3 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-seven 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: v1.5.3 — Samsung TTS startup bypass — Skips all TextToSpeech creation on Samsung at startup, preventing the infinite reconnect loop caused by Samsung's internal private-engine probe.

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

Pages

What's new in v1.5.3

Samsung TTS startup bypass. Skips all TextToSpeech creation on Samsung at startup, preventing the infinite reconnect loop caused by Samsung's internal private-engine probe.

  • App no longer creates any TextToSpeech instance at startup on Samsung devices. Samsung's modified framework internally probes its private default engine during any TTS connection setup, disconnecting all active instances and entering an unstoppable reconnect loop. Prior fixes (#1384, #1390) filtered the private engine from our code but Samsung's framework bypassed the filter. Piper/Kokoro/Azure voices remain available in the picker. (#1392)

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