Home

Candela wiki

Current version: v1.13.1 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: 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, reddit, Google News, Google Drive, your device calendar, Bookshare, the Epic & Prime Gaming free-game rotations, the in-app Candela Handbook, and Readability web articles); four in-process voice families (Piper, Kokoro, KittenTTS, Supertonic 3) 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; on-device Voice Notes (record → transcribe on-device → optional consent-gated AI summary); built for Android phones, tablets, and Wear OS.

📦 Latest release: v1.13.1 — Jade Forge — The overnight-crew release: two quality-of-life fixes that

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

---

Pages

• Getting started — Install, sign-in, first listen
• Fiction sources — All thirty-three backends and their setup paths
• AI chat — Seven providers, grounding, recaps, sessions
• Voices — Piper, Kokoro, KittenTTS, Supertonic 3, Azure HD, voice library
• Voice catalog — Flat reference of all catalog entries
• Settings reference — Every knob explained
• Architecture — Forty-eight modules, plugin seam, data flow
• Building from source — Toolchain, gradle, signing
• Troubleshooting — Sideload, voice download, BYOK setup, OAuth flow

What's new in v1.13.1

Jade Forge. The overnight-crew release: two quality-of-life fixes that

• Sharing a link from another app (Chrome, news readers, anywhere) now actually lands in Candela: the Add-by-URL sheet opens pre-filled with the shared link, one tap from your library. Previously the URL was silently dropped. (#1679)
• In-app brand casing corrected to TechEMPOWER across user-facing strings. (#1671)
• Chapter lists open scrolled to your resume chapter instead of the top -- no more flinging through a hundred chapters to find your place. Live follow-the-playing-chapter is tracked separately in #1676.
• Release builds now bundle native debug symbols for crash symbolication (#1674; upstream symbol coverage tracked in #1691).
• Voice-engine pool builders deduplicated across Piper/Kokoro/KittenTTS (#1503).
• Compose-UI test toolchain enabled for :feature (#1661) and the Voice Notes backup-rules test hardened (#1659).
• Ten dependency updates (Compose BOM, Dagger Hilt 2.60.1, sherpa-onnx 1.13.4, Wear, testing, and friends) landed via a serialized Dependabot cascade, and the auto-rebase swarm that used to OOM the CI runner is structurally fixed (rebase-strategy: disabled).

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