Since the last post, two smaller refinements landed. Both are quiet changes to parts of Face Chat you’ve had for a while — but they close real gaps in how it behaves day to day.
Your Voice Picks, Kept
It has always been able to remember which voice and which language you prefer. What it hadn’t done properly was honour that memory at the start of a session: the speaking engine would boot up, settle on its built-in default, and your saved choice would quietly lose the race.
That’s fixed. When Face Chat comes up, it reads its saved voice preference and starts speaking in exactly the voice you chose last time. If that voice has gone missing in the meantime — a system update, a language pack removed — it doesn’t pretend. The picker shows the saved voice marked as unavailable, so you can see the gap instead of being handed a random default and never noticing.
Say “use a female voice” on Tuesday; on Wednesday it picks up where it left off. No re-teaching.
Choosing Which Camera to Look Through
Until now, the camera was whichever one the operating system handed over — usually whatever happened to be first. If you had a laptop camera, a USB webcam, and a capture card on the same machine, there was no way to say which one to use.
Now it can list every camera it finds, and each device only shows up once even if the system reports it under more than one name. The control bar has gained a small camera picker: “System default” on top, then each named device. Pick one and the head looks through it from then on; switch back to the default and it behaves exactly as it always did. The choice is remembered, so the next time you open it, it opens its eyes on the same camera.
If you’d rather not use the picker at all, it still accepts a fixed camera name from its configuration, for the setups that start it on a known machine.
The Feeling
Nothing here is a new sense. It’s the difference between an assistant that mostly behaves and one you stop having to correct: it comes back the way you left it, and when it opens its eyes, you get to decide which ones.