#Roadmap

The path to 1.0, milestone by milestone. 0.x means evolving preview — breaking changes are still allowed. 1.0.0 means the core API is stable and the milestones below are complete.

#Shipped

• A StoryLark-branded base that builds and boots: read/listen/read+listen modes with word-synced read-along, offline downloads, cross-device sync, accounts, and push notifications
• Per-brand theming via a brand.json + theme.css token contract
• Sample content: public-domain stories published through the pipeline, so a fresh install has something to read and hear out of the box
• A bundled, free narrator: the pipeline synthesizes word-synced narration on your own machine with 28 open voices — no account, no API key, no per-character billing. Premium cloud voices (Azure) remain an optional bring-your-own-key upgrade
• A live demo at storylark.dev, showcasing both voice tiers
• The three-layer package model: the engine (storylark-core + its Vite preset), API Worker (storylark-worker), and content pipeline (storylark-pipeline) are separate, versioned packages — a branded site is just an entry file, a config, and a theme folder, and pulling in engine updates can never touch its theme or layout
• Exact word-synced narration from the free bundled narrator: timings are force-aligned against the actual audio, not estimated
• An open gallery of themes and presentation templates at gallery.storylark.dev, with a community submission process
• Demo hardening: version banner, release-tracking redeploys, and links across the StoryLark sites
• The storylark-* packages published to the public npm registry, with automated releases on every merge (Changesets)
• The live demo consumes the published packages exactly like any deployer would — proving the update model end to end
• Multiple narrator voices — a library can publish more than one narrator; a picker in Settings switches between them, synced across devices and available offline

#Now

• Rolling out a second narrator voice on the live demo, and closing out the rest of the M7 feature list below

#Next

• Screen-awake during read-along (Wake Lock)
• "Listen to anything" — paste text, or bring a PDF, URL, or document, with on-device voices
• On-device voice & language picker for imported content
• Voice previews — hear a short sample sentence of each narrator right in Settings before you pick one
• Social sign-in (Apple, Google, Microsoft)
• iOS background audio for driving — a research spike
• Opt-in automatic updates for downstream sites (Renovate)

#Later

Hardening toward 1.0: an automated test suite and CI quality gate, a full device/browser QA pass, an accessibility audit, rate-limiting across every auth endpoint, complete API documentation, and a final API-stability review that freezes the config, theme, and manifest contracts for 1.0.0. A create-storylark scaffolder (npm create storylark) is planned as a 1.1 convenience layer once the contracts are frozen.

Found a gap? StoryLark is open source — improve these docs on GitHub.