Changelog — 2.1–2.4

Sharing & Thumbnail Fixes

• Better vignette share previews — Sharing a vignette now uses a concise, automatically generated summary sentence instead of raw story content. Existing vignettes fall back to a story excerpt.
• Vignette archive excerpts — Vignette cards on the archive page now also display the generated summary instead of internal content.
• Correct reflection video thumbnail — The homepage reflection video now shows the title card as its thumbnail, matching the detail page behaviour.

Video Caption & Alignment Fixes

• Caption alignment fix — Fixed word-level caption timing that broke when narration text contained parentheses or brackets. These characters fall outside the alignment model's vocabulary and caused the entire caption track to fail silently. All special punctuation is now stripped before alignment.
• Accurate word timestamps — Fixed an issue where word-level timestamps were compressed to a fraction of the actual audio duration, causing captions to appear and disappear far too early. Timestamps now span the full narration correctly.
• Cleaner word boundaries — Eliminated phantom zero-length words that inflated caption word counts (e.g. 857 words instead of 177), producing cleaner subtitle tracks with accurate word-by-word highlighting.
• Snappier title card — Title card now fades out after 4 seconds (previously held for the full intro duration), with a quicker 1-second fade for a smoother transition into content.
• Full vignette pipeline verified — End-to-end vignette generation (story, images, panels, audio, captions, video) confirmed working across all audience styles.

Multilingual Audio & Consolidated Voice Services

• Consolidated audio infrastructure — Unified 4 audio/voice services onto a single high-performance server for faster processing and simpler maintenance
• Arabic & Farsi voice synthesis — New text-to-speech support for Arabic and Farsi, enabling audio generation for multilingual content
• Local AI transcription — On-premises speech recognition supporting 52 languages with dramatically better quality on noisy audio, accents, and dialects. No external API dependency
• Document audio generation — New admin tool for generating audio from pasted text with automatic language detection and voice routing
• Multilingual static page audio — Static page audio now handles Arabic and Farsi content alongside English, producing seamless merged output
• Local AI translation — Subtitle translation now uses the local high-performance LLM by default, eliminating cloud API costs with automatic fallback
• Dynamic video encoding timeout — Video composition timeout scales with duration, fixing errors on longer videos
• Real-time encoding progress — Video generation shows actual encoding percentage in the admin UI

Network Resilience — Video Generation

• Automatic retry for voice generation — Video generation now automatically retries on transient network failures with exponential backoff (up to 3 attempts), fixing intermittent errors during audio generation
• Timeout protection — All voice synthesis calls now have configurable timeouts preventing indefinite hangs during video generation
• Storage fetch retry — Asset fetches (panel images, sound effects, music tracks, artwork) retry automatically on transient failures across both Vignettes and Reflections
• Clearer error messages — Video generation errors now identify the specific scene and step that failed, replacing generic error messages

ScribeFlow — Transcription Model Selector

• Dynamic model discovery — Available transcription models are now detected automatically based on audio input capability, so new models appear without manual updates
• Searchable model selector — Replaced the basic dropdown with a searchable, filterable picker showing model details and recommended badges
• Active model indicator — Visual indicator showing the currently saved transcription model at a glance
• Broader model support — More AI transcription models now available for selection, covering a wider range of providers and capabilities

Intelligent Content Generation

• Upgraded AI content generation with a new local-first architecture for faster, more reliable results
• All content generation tasks (reflections, vignettes, artwork prompts, video metadata) now use intelligent routing with automatic failover
• New LLM Usage dashboard for administrators to monitor AI request patterns and costs
• Unified content generation pipeline — consistent quality across all features
• Reduced dependency on external AI services with local inference for ~85% of tasks
• Content is now enriched with authentic scripture references from our knowledge base — reflections and vignettes draw on real hadith, duas, and Quranic verses
• Every AI request is now audited with token counts, response times, and cost tracking

March 22, 2026

Image Generation Improvements

Editor UX

Background Audio Management

Community & Contact

SEO & Page Quality

March 21, 2026 — Eid al-Fitr / Nowruz

Vignettes — Islamic Anecdotes

A new content format alongside Reflections — short moral anecdotes rooted in Islamic scripture, inspired by classical storytelling traditions. Each vignette targets a specific audience with tailored writing, visuals, audio, and video.

Reflections Enhancements

SEO & Social Sharing