🔊 The natural voice actually speaks now (v0.15.1)

Turns out the natural announcement voice has likely never played for anyone: the speech service behind it (Cloudflare's MeloTTS) was failing on every request, and the app fell back to the robotic device voice so smoothly that nothing ever looked broken.

• Switched to a better voice. Bird names are now spoken by Deepgram Aura — a more natural, modern neural voice than the one that was failing — with the old service kept as an automatic backup, so one provider having a bad day can't silence the feature again.
• Everything else about the voice is unchanged: fetched once per bird, cached for offline replay, plays through the audio channel so the silent switch doesn't mute it.

🩹 Sessions that heal themselves (v0.15.0)

The big one for leaving BirdWatch running in a pocket or vest: it can no longer silently go deaf.

• The problem: if a phone call, Siri, an alarm, or another app took over the microphone mid-session, the app kept showing a green "Listening" — while actually hearing nothing. You could walk for an hour detecting zero birds and never know.
• Now: BirdWatch notices within seconds that audio has stopped, switches the status (and the pocket lock screen) to an amber "Reconnecting mic…", and quietly rebuilds the microphone connection — retrying until it comes back, like after a call ends. Your session, feed, and stats carry on where they left off. Only a real permission loss stops the session, with a clear Retry message.
• Screen-sleep protection re-arms itself. A quick app switch or pocket-press of the side button used to silently cancel the keep-awake lock, so the screen could sleep minutes later and end the session. It's now re-engaged every time BirdWatch returns to the foreground.

🗣️ Snappier, leaner voice (v0.14.3)

The natural announcement voice now speaks with no perceptible delay.

• Prefetched just in time. The moment BirdWatch starts working out which bird it's hearing, it quietly fetches that name's clip — so by the time the detection is confirmed a second or so later, the announcement plays instantly instead of after a network pause. Your watchlisted birds are pre-fetched too, so their alerts are instant the very first time (and ready offline before you head out).
• Generated once for everybody. Each bird name's clip is now cached at the source, so the voice model runs a single time per name across all users — faster for everyone and near-free to run.
• No wasted re-work. A bird you've already heard this session replays from memory instead of being re-decoded each time.

🪶 Smoother, steadier listening (v0.14.2)

Under-the-hood tuning for more reliable detection.

• Less behind-the-scenes work per second. BirdWatch was building and shipping a large chunk of data on every listening cycle that nothing actually used. Cutting it frees up the phone to keep the detection loop on schedule — especially on older, memory-tight phones (like an iPhone 13 mini), where that churn could occasionally cause a missed moment.
• A touch more rumble filtering. Slightly more of the low-frequency traffic/wind/handling noise is filtered out before the model listens, for a cleaner signal. (Birds live well above that range, so nothing you want to hear is affected.)

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