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Candela wiki

Current version: v1.12.6 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: v1.12.6 — Luminous Aegis — Closes out the Settings overhaul (#1624): a deadline-reminder enable toggle, plus the last of the buried source configuration — Discord, Telegram, Google News, and local .epub/.pdf folders — moved into the Content Sources subscreen.

📖 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 thirty-three 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 — 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 v1.12.6

Luminous Aegis. Closes out the Settings overhaul (#1624): a deadline-reminder enable toggle, plus the last of the buried source configuration — Discord, Telegram, Google News, and local .epub/.pdf folders — moved into the Content Sources subscreen.

• Deadline reminders enable toggle (#1631) — a master switch in the Notifications subscreen. Turning it off stops new deadline reminders from being scheduled; ones you've already set keep working (never drops an existing alarm). Default on.
• Content Sources — the bespoke tail (#1630 §C) — Discord (guild select), Telegram (channel-discovery probe), Google News (full-article toggle), and local .epub/.pdf folder pickers now live in the Content Sources subscreen instead of the legacy long-scroll page. Per-source config now lives in exactly one place, consistent with the §B migration.
• Completes the #1624 settings-IA epic + the #1630 source-migration tail (#1644): every per-source config and previously-buried setting now has a discoverable home in the grouped hub. The deadline toggle gates only new scheduling — the boot re-arm path is untouched, so existing reminders can't be dropped.

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