Changelog

For visitors who listen to the translation through headphones. Until now, the audio stopped the moment a phone's screen locked, so the app kept the screen switched on for the whole sermon, and that drained the battery. With the new app update, visitors can lock their phone and put it in a pocket.

• Lock the Phone, Keep Listening: On iPhone and Android, the translation keeps playing when the screen locks or goes to sleep. The app no longer keeps the screen on while audio plays, so the battery lasts through the service.
• Pause From the Lock Screen: The lock screen shows Church Translation · your church's name with a pause button. On Android it sits in the notification. Pausing there turns the audio off in the app too.
• Locked Phones Still Count as Listening: A visitor listening with the screen locked stays in your Users Online list, and their language stays switched on. A pocketed phone no longer looks like nobody is listening.
• Audio Switches Itself Off After the Service: If no new translation has played for 30 minutes, the audio turns off by itself, in the app and in the browser. Every new sentence starts the 30 minutes again, so a long sermon or a music break never triggers it.
• Archive Days Play to the End: Listening to a past service from the archive used to stop after about two minutes. It now plays the whole day. If one sentence fails to load, playback skips to the next one instead of stopping.

To get started:

Visitors need the latest app (version 2.5.1) from the App Store or Google Play. Nothing changes in your admin settings.

One thing that stays the same: in the browser at app.churchtranslation.org, locking the screen still stops the audio. Phone browsers don't let a web page keep playing in the background, so the screen stays on while visitors listen there. If someone at your church wants to listen with the phone in their pocket, point them to the app.

Speech recognition waits for a pause before it sends a sentence to the phones. Until now that wait was fixed, unless your preacher spoke Swiss German. Now every church decides for itself: a shorter wait means translations reach the congregation sooner, and a longer wait keeps whole sentences together.

• Three Clear Choices, Every Language: Pick Fast, Balanced or Accurate under Speech-to-text speed. The setting works the same way whichever language you dictate in.
• Fast for Quick Back-and-Forth: Translations reach the phones sooner. That suits short sentences, interviews and announcements. The trade-off: a long sentence can be split at a breath, and half a sentence translates less well than a whole one.
• Accurate for Long, Winding Sentences: Waits longest, so a preacher who pauses mid-thought still arrives as one sentence.
• Nothing Changed Unless You Change It: Balanced is the default and works exactly as before. You won't notice anything until you pick something else.
• Swiss German Joins In: The old millisecond setting for Swiss German is replaced by these three choices. If you had tuned it, we moved you to the closest one: up to 600 ms became Fast, up to 1,500 ms Balanced, anything longer Accurate.

To get started:

1. Go to Settings → Speech-to-text settings.
2. Find Speech-to-text speed and click Edit.
3. Choose Fast, Balanced or Accurate and click Save.

One thing worth knowing: a change applies from your next session. A service that is already running keeps the speed it started with, so try a new setting in the week rather than in the middle of a sermon.

If a visitor's phone was set to Chinese, Serbian or Mongolian, the app let them down. The translation itself appeared, but the menu button did nothing at all — no settings, no language picker, no archive, no announcements, and no error to explain it. Every other phone language worked normally, which made it hard to spot. This is fixed for everyone on those three languages.

• The menu opens again: Tapping the menu button now opens it, on every phone language. A visitor can reach the language picker, the archive and their settings the way everyone else always could.
• The app arrives in their language: A phone set to Chinese now opens in Chinese, and it tells the two apart — Traditional stays Traditional, Simplified stays Simplified. The same goes for Serbian and for Mongolian.
• Nothing to set up: No setting changed, and there is nothing for you to switch on. The next time an affected visitor opens your QR link, it simply works.
• The old workaround can be retired: If you have been telling visitors to set their phone to English first, open the link, then pick their language by hand, they can stop. Anyone who did that keeps the language they chose.

One thing worth knowing: the phone's language is only ever a starting point. It is read the first time a visitor opens the app, and after that the language they pick inside the app wins — so a visitor who has already chosen German keeps German no matter what their phone says. If someone was affected and picked English to get around this, they will want to switch to their own language once, in the app.