A substantial expansion of the library, a meaningful upgrade to the Pronunciation Coach, and a more honest Privacy Promise.
New series in this release:
- Food of the World, starting with Soul Food of the Southern United States, and Persian Food
- Vehicles, with The Story of the Motorcycle and The Story of the Train
- Musical Instruments of the World, opening with The Oud
- AI This Week — a recurring weekly dialog between two narrators about what's actually shipping in AI, fact-checked and rendered in over thirty languages
New chapters in existing series:
- Little Escapes adds Gardening and Sailing — short, calm essays about lifelong amateur hobbies
- Pirate Biographies adds Hayreddin Barbarossa, alongside an additional voice and new languages for Zheng Yi Sao
- Tolstoy's What Men Live By, translated into many languages with full audio
The Pronunciation Coach now offers seven model tiers — from a quick Tiny model that runs almost instantly, up to a Full-Weight Large Turbo that holds its own across all 51 languages. Each tier is described in plain language so you can choose between speed, size, and accuracy for your device and target language. Scoring is more honest, too: punctuation no longer drags down your acoustic score, numerals are excluded from the per-word probabilities they were quietly poisoning, and the heard-text display reflects what was actually transcribed instead of a sanitized version.
The Earthgate audiobook reader scrolls more gently — the active word lands a touch closer to the middle of the screen, with a little more room to read forward. The transport bar at the bottom stays stable on first play (previously the chapter row would collapse on books without chapters and shrink the controls).
Settings now has an anonymous-analytics toggle. Session-scoped usage data is collected by default so we can decide which packs and languages to invest in next: no accounts, no device identifiers, no IP storage, no third-party trackers. One tap to switch it off, and you don't need an account to do it. The full Privacy Promise has been rewritten to spell out exactly what's collected, why, and how to opt out.
The voice library has expanded with new narrators, including August (a new English baritone) and Sadachbia, alongside the dual-voice pairing that carries the AI This Week dialog.