KOAssistant v0.16.1 Release Notes

This is a maintenance and bugfix release update to v0.16.0.

Improvements

View Artifacts in Action Input Dialog

• The action input dialog now shows all cached content types (X-Ray, Summary, Analysis) instead of just summary
• Single cache: opens directly with a labeled button (e.g. "View Summary")
• Multiple caches: shows a "View Artifacts" selector popup
• Generate Summary fallback removed (accessible via Quick Actions or gestures)

Bug Fixes

RTL Dictionary Fixes

• Fixed dictionary compact view falling back to English for users with the new interaction_languages format — language resolution now correctly passes interaction_languages to getEffectiveDictionaryLanguage()
• Fixed headword and IPA appearing in wrong visual order in RTL dictionary compact view — Latin content in RTL paragraphs placed IPA before headword
• Fixed BiDi reordering of Latin bold markers in RTL dictionary view by adding LRM to maintain LTR continuity
• Fixed missing fixIPABidi call in the streaming update path for dictionary compact view

Other Fixes

• Fixed stripMarkdown() not being RTL-aware, causing LRM characters to override para_direction_rtl in explicit RTL mode
• Fixed release notes viewer not detecting RTL content for proper text direction
• Fixed View Artifacts button incorrectly appearing in general chat context when triggered from a book

Full Changelog: v0.15.0...v0.16.1

KOAssistant v0.16.0 Release Notes

New Features

Web Search Per-Action Controls & New Web Actions

• Per-action web search setting: Each action now has a tri-state web search control (Follow Global / Always On / Never). Configurable
  in both built-in Edit Settings and custom action editors.
• Web search blocked by default for 30 actions where it adds noise and latency (dictionary, translate, text analysis, document generators)
• 3 new web-search-enabled actions:
• Fact Check (highlight): Verify claims against current sources
• Current Context (highlight): Get latest developments on a highlighted topic
• Book Reviews (book): Critical and reader reception for the current book

File Browser Action Pinning

• Pin any non-reading book action to the file browser long-press menu via Action Manager (hold → "Add to File Browser")
• Pinned actions appear as one-tap buttons, skipping the action selector
• Improved button layout: utility and main buttons merged into rows (max 4 per row, equally distributed)
• Main button renamed from "KOAssistant" to "Chat/Action (KOA)"
• Action details panel with compact toggle buttons (2 per row)

Dictionary Lookup on Text Selection

• Selecting 1-3 words in any chat viewer now triggers a dictionary lookup (via KOReader dictionary or AI bypass) instead of copying to
  clipboard
• 4+ words still copies to clipboard as before
• Respects your dictionary bypass setting

View Artifacts

• "View Caches" renamed to "View Artifacts" throughout the UI
• File browser now shows all available caches (X-Ray, Summary, Analysis) in a popup instead of just summary
• Regenerate button available when viewing summary artifact from an open book

New Actions

• ELI5 added to Quick Actions panel
• Key Arguments (Smart): Token-efficient variant using summary cache
• Generate Quiz: Full-text variant for comprehensive quiz generation
• All smart/non-smart action pairs now follow consistent pattern

Emoji Icons Setting

• New toggle in Display Settings (default: off)
• Shows emoji icons (e.g., 🔍 for web search) on devices with emoji font support
• Devices without emoji fonts show text-only labels

Open Last Chat

• New button in Quick Settings panel to quickly resume your most recent conversation

Improvements

Performance

• TCP warmup timeout: Reduced from 5s to 0.5s, skipped entirely on non-macOS devices. Eliminates visible UI hangs on slow/unreliable
  networks.
• Deferred chat index validation: Moved from synchronous boot to lazy execution on first Chat History open. Removes seconds of startup
  delay for users with many indexed books.
• Non-blocking update check: Removed blocking isOnline() call from auto-update startup. HTTP request already has its own timeout.
• Anthropic streaming: Eliminated redundant JSON decode/re-encode cycle on request bodies.

Actions & Prompts

• Full-document action prompts rewritten: removed token caps (truncated responses waste tokens), added coverage guidance to prevent
  front-loading
• Discussion Questions action fixed to use full document text instead of silently missing summary cache
• Key Arguments action changed to analyze actual book text instead of pre-digested analysis
• All {title} by {author} patterns normalized to {title}{author_clause} for graceful handling of missing author metadata
• Dictionary action prompts now use the actual highlighted word as headword format instead of generic "word"
• max_tokens raised to 4096 minimum for dictionary and news actions (fixes Gemini 2.5 thinking token truncation)

Internationalization

• Full action names in compact dictionary view (fixes broken text in Arabic, CJK, and other non-Latin scripts)
• "Lang" button renamed to "Language" in compact and translate views
• Language picker in compact and translate views now includes Additional Languages
• +Note button now translatable

Configuration

• updateConfigFromSettings() now merges instead of replacing the features table, preserving runtime context flags
• All action entry points (file browser, dictionary, book-level, general) now refresh configuration before use, preventing stale
  provider/model

Bug Fixes

• Fixed infinite loop in replace_placeholder() when document content contains literal placeholder strings (e.g., a README documenting
  {full_document_section}). Caused unbounded memory growth.
• Fixed Deep Analysis ignoring highlighted word when it resembled an internal placeholder (e.g., "image", "text")
• Fixed utility placeholders ({conciseness_nudge}, {hallucination_nudge}) appearing literally in AI prompts for direct-prompt actions
• Fixed compound context handling: expandContext() and helpers now handle all compound context strings correctly
• Fixed file browser actions showing highlight-context actions on first open (features table replacement bug)
• Fixed highlight entry point not clearing stale multi-book metadata from previous context
• Fixed web search emoji icon toggle not applying correctly
• Removed dead "all" compound context that was unreachable from any UI path

Testing

• ~190 new unit tests covering templates, export, message history, action service, prompt building, and system prompts
• Test suite updated for non-streaming background request format
• New file browser action tests

Also in v0.15.0 (if you are updating from v0.14.x):

v0.15.0 was a major release with document analysis caching (X-Ray/Recap), web search (Anthropic/Gemini/OpenRouter), per-book notebooks,
Quick Actions panel, gesture menu integration, privacy controls, native script language pickers, Plain Text view mode, RTL support, update
checker, and much more.

See the full v0.15.0 release notes for details.