feat: a reading voice in Settings, and a tutor that reads every figure

The voice picker was a dropdown in the quiz player, beside the question — the
one control on that screen with nothing to do with answering it, and one a
learner sets once and never touches. It is a setting now, on the user rather
than in a Redis blob, with a play button beside each voice because a voice is
worth hearing before it is chosen. Choosing nothing stays a real choice: it
means whatever an administrator marked default, so a site that changes its
default reaches everybody without a row being edited.

The tutor reads figures from `question_media` rather than the two legacy path
columns. Those agree exactly today, so nothing was being lost — the first
question given a second figure in the editor would have been the one that
broke it, silently and only for the tutor. The legacy columns remain as a
fallback for anything not projected into that table yet.

And the retrieval thresholds are written down in docs/retrieval-thresholds.md:
the three answers, the sixteen queries they were measured against, why they are
deliberately not the retrieval floor, and how to re-measure when the corpus
grows. Worth keeping the headline in mind — "discuss love" scores 0.491,
alongside "tell me a joke". A number in the 0.4s is noise, not a weak signal.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN

backend/alembic/versions/e7f8091a2b3c_user_voice_preference.py

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+"""A learner's own reading voice.
+
+It was a dropdown in the quiz player, beside the question — the one control on
+that screen with nothing to do with answering, and one a learner would set once
+and never touch again. That is a setting.
+
+Revision ID: e7f8091a2b3c
+Revises: d6e7f8091a2b
+"""
+import sqlalchemy as sa
+from alembic import op
+
+revision = "e7f8091a2b3c"
+down_revision = "d6e7f8091a2b"
+branch_labels = None
+depends_on = None
+
+
+def upgrade():
+    if "tts_voice" not in {c["name"] for c in sa.inspect(op.get_bind()).get_columns("users")}:
+        op.add_column("users", sa.Column("tts_voice", sa.String(), nullable=True))
+
+
+def downgrade():
+    op.drop_column("users", "tts_voice")

backend/app/models/user.py

@@ -20,6 +20,12 @@ class User(Base):
     active_exam_id = Column(Integer, ForeignKey("exams.id", ondelete="SET NULL"), nullable=True)
     is_unthrottled = Column(Integer, default=0)  # 1 = exempt from rate limits
     reminders_disabled = Column(Boolean, default=False, nullable=False, server_default=sa_false())
+    # Which voice reads a question aloud. A setting, not a decision to retake at
+    # the top of every session — it used to be a dropdown in the player, beside
+    # the question, where it was the only control on screen that had nothing to
+    # do with answering. Null means whichever voice an administrator marked
+    # default, so a learner who never opens Settings still gets a working one.
+    tts_voice = Column(String, nullable=True)
     created_at = Column(DateTime, default=datetime.utcnow)
 
     # passive_deletes leaves the child rows to the database, which already

backend/app/routers/auth.py

@@ -278,8 +278,10 @@ def get_user_settings(
     except Exception as e:
         import logging; logging.getLogger(__name__).warning(f"Failed to load user settings: {e}")
 
-    # Canonical opt-out preference comes from the DB
+    # Canonical preferences come from the DB. Redis holds the rest, and a cache
+    # is not where a choice somebody made once should live.
     data["reminders_disabled"] = bool(current_user.reminders_disabled)
+    data["tts_voice"] = current_user.tts_voice
     return data
 
 
@@ -292,8 +294,15 @@ def save_user_settings(
     """Save user settings. reminders_disabled is persisted to Postgres;
     other keys go to Redis."""
     # Persist opt-out preference to DB (canonical source for the scheduler)
+    changed = False
     if "reminders_disabled" in settings_data:
         current_user.reminders_disabled = bool(settings_data.get("reminders_disabled"))
+        changed = True
+    if "tts_voice" in settings_data:
+        voice = (settings_data.get("tts_voice") or "").strip()
+        current_user.tts_voice = voice or None
+        changed = True
+    if changed:
         db.add(current_user)
         db.commit()
 

backend/app/routers/teach.py

@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ from app.models.ai_model_config import AIModelConfig
 from app.models.attempt import QuizAttempt
 from app.models.user import User
 from app.utils.quiz_access import require_question_access
-from app.services import site_settings, vision_service
+from app.services import question_figures, site_settings, vision_service
 from app.services.quiz_builder import bank_question_predicate
 from app.utils.auth import check_rate_limit, get_current_user, require_moderator
 
@@ -80,22 +80,44 @@ def _find_similar_questions(db: Session, question: Question, user: User, limit:
         return []
 
 
-def _figures(question: Question) -> list[vision_service.Image]:
+#: What a figure's role is called when it is described to the tutor. The two
+#: are not interchangeable: "the figure in the explanation" and "the figure in
+#: the stem" mean different things to something that has been told the answer.
+FIGURE_CAPTIONS = {
+    "stem": "the figure printed with the question stem",
+    "explanation": "the figure printed with the explanation",
+}
+
+
+def _figures(db: Session, question: Question) -> list[vision_service.Image]:
     """The pictures printed with this question, loaded from storage.
 
     The learner is looking at them. Until now the tutor was not: it was handed
     the stem, the options and the answer key as text and left to teach around a
     radiograph it had never seen, which produces confident sentences about a
-    finding nobody described. Captions say which is which, because "the figure
+    finding nobody described.
-    in the explanation" and "the figure in the stem" mean different things to a
+
-    tutor that has been told the answer.
+    Read from `question_media`, which is where figures live — a question may
+    carry several, and the two legacy path columns can hold only one each.
+    They agree today, so nothing was being lost yet; the first question given a
+    second figure in the editor would have been the one that broke it, silently
+    and only for the tutor.
     """
-    wanted = [
+    rows = question_figures.figures_for(db, question.id)
-        (question.image_path, "the figure printed with the question stem"),
+    images = [
-        (question.explanation_image_path, "the figure printed with the explanation"),
+        vision_service.load_image(row["path"],
+                                  FIGURE_CAPTIONS.get(row.get("role"), "a figure printed with this question"))
+        for row in rows if row.get("path")
     ]
-    loaded = [vision_service.load_image(path, caption) for path, caption in wanted if path]
+    if not images:
-    return [image for image in loaded if image]
+        # Nothing projected into `question_media` yet — a question written
+        # before that table existed, or one whose backfill has not run.
+        legacy = [
+            (question.image_path, FIGURE_CAPTIONS["stem"]),
+            (question.explanation_image_path, FIGURE_CAPTIONS["explanation"]),
+        ]
+        images = [vision_service.load_image(path, caption) for path, caption in legacy if path]
+    return [image for image in images if image]
 
 
 def _option_label(index: int) -> str:
@@ -300,7 +322,7 @@ async def chat(
     # async endpoint, so it goes to a worker thread rather than stopping every
     # other request on this uvicorn worker.
     handoff = None
-    figures = await run_in_threadpool(_figures, question)
+    figures = await run_in_threadpool(_figures, db, question)
     if figures:
         try:
             parts, handoff = await run_in_threadpool(

backend/app/routers/tts.py

@@ -78,11 +78,16 @@ def text_to_speech(
 
     text = request.text[:2000]
 
-    if request.voice and request.voice.startswith("local-"):
+    # The player no longer asks, so the learner's own setting is what decides —
+    # falling through to whatever an administrator marked default when they have
+    # never chosen one. A caller may still name a voice, which is how a preview
+    # in Settings plays the one being considered rather than the one in force.
+    wanted = request.voice or current_user.tts_voice
+    if wanted and wanted.startswith("local-"):
         config = db.query(AIModelConfig).filter(
             AIModelConfig.task == "tts",
             AIModelConfig.is_active == True,
-            AIModelConfig.model_id == request.voice,
+            AIModelConfig.model_id == wanted,
         ).first()
         if not config:
             model_id, api_key = _default_tts_model(db)

backend/app/services/ai_mode_service.py

@@ -206,7 +206,8 @@ def sources_block(sources: list[dict]) -> str:
 # to come from the library, and a wrong claim costs them their trust in every
 # other answer.
 #
-# Worth re-measuring when the corpus changes size or subject. Anything else is
+# Worth re-measuring when the corpus changes size or subject; the method and
+# the full measurement are in docs/retrieval-thresholds.md. Anything else is
 # tuning by feel against numbers nobody wrote down.
 STRONG_MATCH = 0.55
 ADJACENT_MATCH = 0.50

docs/retrieval-thresholds.md

@@ -0,0 +1,86 @@
+# What "close enough" means
+
+AI Mode gives one of three answers, and which one is decided by a number rather
+than by asking the model to work out its own situation. This is where that
+number comes from, what it was measured against, and how to re-measure it.
+
+## Why a number and not a longer prompt
+
+Retrieval could not say "nothing". `hybrid_ids()` fuses a lexical ranker and a
+semantic one by reciprocal rank, throws the distances away, and returns the
+*union* — so the shortlist was never empty. A question about photosynthesis came
+back with six paediatric sources and an instruction to answer only from them.
+
+Adding scenarios to the prompt would have asked the model to classify, in prose,
+a situation the data already knows. Classification-by-prose is the part that does
+not work, and it is also the part that makes prompts long. So the branch lives in
+code: `ai_mode_service.answer_mode()`.
+
+## The three answers
+
+| closeness | mode | what the learner gets |
+|---|---|---|
+| `>= STRONG_MATCH` | `sourced` | answered from the library, cited |
+| `>= ADJACENT_MATCH` | `adjacent` | "nothing covers this directly; the closest is…", then an answer marking which parts came from where |
+| below | `open` | one line saying the library does not cover it, then an answer from general knowledge, citing nothing |
+| unmeasurable (`None`) | `sourced` | see below |
+
+**Unmeasurable is not low.** No vector database, or a downed encoder, returns
+`None`. Retrieval still found its rows by other means, so they are still cited;
+dropping every citation because the ruler is missing is the worse failure.
+
+## The numbers, and the measurement behind them
+
+In `backend/app/services/ai_mode_service.py`:
+
+```python
+STRONG_MATCH = 0.55
+ADJACENT_MATCH = 0.50
+```
+
+Measured on 2026-09-12, against the corpus with article bodies embedded — eight
+clearly on-topic questions and eight clearly off-topic, scored with
+`search_service.top_similarity()` over the article and section corpora:
+
+| | range | examples |
+|---|---|---|
+| off-topic | **0.339 – 0.499** | the French revolution 0.339 · how do I bake sourdough 0.410 · quantum entanglement 0.448 · javascript closures 0.452 · tell me a joke 0.455 · what is a mortgage 0.462 · discuss love 0.491 · photosynthesis 0.499 |
+| on-topic | **0.586 – 0.740** | neonatal jaundice phototherapy 0.586 · what causes croup 0.594 · febrile seizure workup 0.638 · Kawasaki disease 0.660 · testicular torsion 0.713 · bronchiolitis in an infant 0.716 · iron deficiency in a toddler 0.733 · posterior urethral valves 0.740 |
+
+The thresholds sit in the gap between those two bands.
+
+Worth noticing that **"discuss love" scores 0.491, alongside "tell me a joke"**.
+It feels adjacent to a paediatrics library — attachment, behaviour — and it is
+not: 0.49 is where anything written in English lands against any corpus. That is
+the reading to keep in mind. A number in the 0.4s is noise, not a weak signal.
+
+## Why these are not `SEMANTIC_FLOOR`
+
+`search_service.SEMANTIC_FLOOR` (0.45) decides what is worth putting in a list,
+where a weak hit costs a reader one glance. These decide whether an answer
+*claims to come from the library*, and a wrong claim there costs a learner their
+trust in every other answer. Different jobs, different numbers, and tying them
+together would mean one could not be tuned without moving the other.
+
+## Re-measuring
+
+Re-measure when the corpus changes size or subject — a much larger library
+raises the floor for everything, because there is more for any query to be
+vaguely near.
+
+```
+docker compose exec -T backend python -c "
+from app.database import SessionLocal
+from app.services.search_service import top_similarity
+db = SessionLocal()
+for q in ['the French revolution', 'tell me a joke', 'discuss love',
+          'what causes croup', 'bronchiolitis in an infant']:
+    print(f'{top_similarity(db, q):.3f}  {q}')
+"
+```
+
+Pick your own on- and off-topic sets, run both, and put the thresholds in the
+gap. If there is no gap, the embeddings are wrong before the thresholds are —
+that is what happened before the article bodies were indexed, when 98% of the
+corpus was embedded on its title and summary alone and every distance was
+measuring the wrong thing.

frontend/src/components/VoiceSetting.css

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+/* A list rather than a dropdown: every voice is worth hearing before it is
+   chosen, and a play button inside a <select> is not a thing. */
+.vset-list { list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; display: flex; flex-direction: column; gap: 6px; }
+.vset-list li { display: flex; align-items: stretch; gap: 6px; }
+
+.vset-pick {
+  flex: 1; display: flex; align-items: center; gap: 10px;
+  padding: 11px 14px; font: inherit; font-size: 0.9rem; text-align: left; cursor: pointer;
+  color: var(--text); background: var(--card-bg);
+  border: 1.5px solid var(--border); border-radius: 9px;
+}
+.vset-pick:hover { border-color: var(--text-subtle); }
+.vset-pick.is-on { border-color: var(--primary); background: var(--option-sel-bg, #e5ecf8); font-weight: 600; }
+.vset-pick small {
+  margin-left: auto; font-size: 0.72rem; font-weight: 600;
+  letter-spacing: 0.04em; text-transform: uppercase; color: var(--text-subtle);
+}
+
+.vset-hear {
+  flex: none; width: 42px; cursor: pointer;
+  font-size: 0.95rem; color: var(--text-muted);
+  background: var(--card-bg); border: 1.5px solid var(--border); border-radius: 9px;
+}
+.vset-hear:hover:not(:disabled) { color: var(--primary); border-color: var(--primary); }
+.vset-hear:disabled { opacity: 0.5; cursor: default; }
+
+.vset-error { margin: 0 0 10px; font-size: 0.85rem; color: var(--wrong-fg); }
+.vset-none { margin: 0; font-size: 0.88rem; color: var(--text-muted); }

frontend/src/components/VoiceSetting.jsx

@@ -0,0 +1,98 @@
+import { useEffect, useRef, useState } from 'react'
+import api from '../api/client'
+import './VoiceSetting.css'
+
+/**
+ * Which voice reads a question aloud.
+ *
+ * It was a dropdown in the quiz player, sitting beside the question — the one
+ * control on that screen with nothing to do with answering it, and one a
+ * learner sets once and then never touches. That is a setting.
+ *
+ * Choosing nothing is a real choice and stays available: it means whichever
+ * voice an administrator marked default, so a learner who never opens this
+ * page still gets a working one, and a site that changes its default reaches
+ * them without anybody editing a row.
+ */
+export default function VoiceSetting() {
+  const [voices, setVoices] = useState([])
+  const [chosen, setChosen] = useState('')
+  const [state, setState] = useState('loading')   // loading | ready | saving | failed
+  const [playing, setPlaying] = useState('')
+  const audio = useRef(null)
+
+  useEffect(() => {
+    let live = true
+    Promise.all([
+      api.get('/tts/voices').catch(() => ({ data: [] })),
+      api.get('/auth/me/settings').catch(() => ({ data: {} })),
+    ]).then(([list, settings]) => {
+      if (!live) return
+      setVoices(list.data || [])
+      setChosen(settings.data?.tts_voice || '')
+      setState('ready')
+    })
+    // Nothing should still be talking after this page closes.
+    return () => { live = false; audio.current?.pause() }
+  }, [])
+
+  const choose = async (value) => {
+    const previous = chosen
+    setChosen(value)
+    setState('saving')
+    try {
+      await api.put('/auth/me/settings', { tts_voice: value || null })
+      setState('ready')
+    } catch {
+      // Put it back rather than showing a choice that was not saved.
+      setChosen(previous)
+      setState('failed')
+    }
+  }
+
+  /** Hear the one being considered, which is not necessarily the one in force. */
+  const preview = async (voice) => {
+    audio.current?.pause()
+    setPlaying(voice)
+    try {
+      const res = await api.post('/tts/speak',
+        { text: 'A four-year-old is brought in with a barking cough.', voice: voice || null },
+        { responseType: 'blob' })
+      const player = new Audio(URL.createObjectURL(res.data))
+      audio.current = player
+      player.onended = () => setPlaying('')
+      await player.play()
+    } catch { setPlaying('') }
+  }
+
+  if (state === 'loading') return <div className="loading"><div className="spinner" /></div>
+  if (!voices.length) {
+    return <p className="vset-none">No reading voices are configured for this site yet.</p>
+  }
+
+  return (
+    <div className="vset">
+      {state === 'failed' && (
+        <p className="vset-error" role="alert">That could not be saved. Try again.</p>
+      )}
+      <ul className="vset-list" role="radiogroup" aria-label="Reading voice">
+        {[{ id: '', name: 'Site default' }, ...voices].map(voice => (
+          <li key={voice.id || 'default'}>
+            <button type="button" role="radio" aria-checked={chosen === voice.id}
+              className={`vset-pick${chosen === voice.id ? ' is-on' : ''}`}
+              disabled={state === 'saving'}
+              onClick={() => choose(voice.id)}>
+              {voice.name}
+              {voice.is_default && voice.id && <small>site default</small>}
+            </button>
+            <button type="button" className="vset-hear"
+              aria-label={`Hear ${voice.name}`} disabled={!!playing}
+              onClick={() => preview(voice.id)}>
+              {playing === voice.id ? '♪' : '▶'}
+            </button>
+          </li>
+        ))}
+      </ul>
+    </div>
+  )
+}

frontend/src/pages/SettingsPage.jsx

@@ -9,6 +9,7 @@ import ExamAdmin from '../components/ExamAdmin'
 import PeopleAdmin from '../components/PeopleAdmin'
 import ModelsAdmin from '../components/ModelsAdmin'
 import './SettingsPage.css'
+import VoiceSetting from '../components/VoiceSetting'
 
 function Section({ title, description, children }) {
   return (
@@ -413,6 +414,13 @@ export default function SettingsPage() {
       render: () => <StudySection /> },
     { key: 'appearance', group: 'You', icon: '🎨', label: 'Appearance',
       render: () => <AppearanceSection /> },
+    { key: 'voice', group: 'You', icon: '🔊', label: 'Reading voice',
+      render: () => (
+        <Section title="Reading voice"
+          description="Which voice reads a question aloud. Hear one before you choose it.">
+          <VoiceSetting />
+        </Section>
+      ) },
     { key: 'data', group: 'You', icon: '🗄️', label: 'Your data',
       render: () => <DataSection /> },
     ...(isModerator ? [