Shipped, fixed, and improved

New

• Transcripts can be checked against the audio before they are pasted — turn on Settings - Performance - Audio verification preview to try it. After you stop, the places a transcript usually goes wrong — where one sentence meets the next, and words the model was unsure of — are listened to again, and the verified text is what gets delivered. Final transcript sets how much is rechecked: Fast finishes the remaining audio, Balanced checks short recordings and uncertain passages, Maximum rechecks the recording with your selected model. Compare keeps delivering the way it does today, then rechecks in the background and shows any difference in Review. It never pastes a second time and never overwrites an edit you made. The preview starts Off and stays opt-in while it is measured on real voices. The Final transcript row says when your choice is not in effect.
• Polish: grammar tidied by a model on this Mac — a new Polish mode on Dictate. Import an instruction model file (GGUF) under Settings - Speech - Local Polish; nothing is downloaded or switched on for you. Message and Prompt use the same model once one is selected. Names from your vocabulary, numbers, versions, identifiers, file paths, links, email addresses and quoted words are checked before anything is pasted. If Polish still changes one after a retry, or takes longer than four seconds, the Clean transcript is delivered instead. The overlay shows Refining while it works. Press Tab to paste the Clean transcript straight away; the words shown while it writes are never pasted.
• Styles by application — give an app its own mode and tone, such as a short Message for chat and Polish for email. The first matching row wins, and an empty row sets the default. Edits you make to a Polish result are kept as style examples, never as automatic word swaps, and Forget style examples clears them.

Improved

• More than one context pack can feed dictation — mark several projects as in use and their terms are ranked together, instead of only the first pack counting. Transcribing a clip again uses the same set.
• Performance shows where the time went after you stop — the timing panel has separate Clean and Polish stages, and each recent dictation lists which check ran, how many passages were retried and how many fell back.
• A recording cut short by a crash is explained on the next launch — the status bar says the unsaved audio and text were discarded. Nothing is resumed or pasted automatically.

Fixed

• Fixed the shortcut doing nothing after the main window was closed — closing the window now hides it, so the shortcut still records, and the tray brings back the same window as you left it.
• Fixed the Dock icon not reopening a hidden window on macOS.
• Fixed the first word going missing when you spoke the instant recording started — speech that arrives while the microphone level is still being measured now counts from the very start of the recording.

New

• Drop an audio file on Review and it becomes a clip — a WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC, OGG or AIFF file, or the audio track of an MP4, MOV or WebM, is run through your model, your languages and your corrections like a dictation, then waits in the queue to be reviewed. Use the Import audio button or drop files anywhere on the window; several at once transcribe one after another, and the file's name becomes the clip's title.
• Every clip exports its own captions — a clip's new Export menu copies SRT or VTT with its timings, and Plan dub in Studio hands the corrected transcript to the dub planner.
• Bring your own speech model — Settings - Models has Import model file… for a .bin you fetched yourself: a slow connection, a proxy, or a build the shelf does not list. The file is checked to really be a Whisper model before it joins the shelf, and it becomes the profile's model when the one named is not installed.

Improved

• Starting a dictation no longer waits on the device list — with no microphone pinned, capture opens straight on the system default and the picker fills in behind it. And until the microphone is really open, the overlay says Opening the microphone… instead of claiming to listen into dead air.
• Free remembers twice the corrections — the free tier keeps 100 learned rules now, up from 50. Pro is unchanged: all of them, plus scoping, merging and export.
• A finished model download stays finished — the progress bar holds at the end until the install is confirmed, so a row no longer flashes back to Download before it shows as installed.

Fixed

• Fixed the first words of a dictation going missing when you started talking the instant the overlay appeared — the microphone now opens on the listening frame itself and keeps what it heard while it warmed up. A burst nobody claims is released after a few seconds rather than holding the microphone open for nothing.
• Fixed stopping a spoken reply silencing speech other apps were playing — 1AudioTool used to stop every say process on the machine; it now stops only the ones it started.

New

• Live translation, on this machine — talk in one language and the captions arrive in another, about a second behind your voice. Each sentence is translated during the pause that follows it, so nobody waits for you to stop. Settings - Speech picks the caption language, and the pack for that pair is a download with its size and its progress. Nothing ships in the bundle and nothing downloads on its own: until you take a pack, the feature says it needs one rather than fetching it behind you. Captions window opens the same captions at reading-across-a-room size — three type sizes, a high-contrast switch, and it stays above other windows. Captions on this network hands anyone on the same Wi-Fi a read-only page, as a link to copy or a QR code to scan on a phone. It carries the pairing token and dies with the pairing session after fifteen minutes; the page then stops updating and says so. Keep the sentence you spoke above its translation, or show only the language your audience reads. The transcript stays what was heard. A translation is never pasted, never stored as the transcript, and never trusted to carry names or filenames.
• A shelf of speech models, with a Settings tab of its own — Settings - Models lists every pack the app can use, with its size, a line on what that size buys, a Download button and progress. A fresh install shows the same shelf's door on Dictate instead of a picker that only says "No model installed", and the first pack to land becomes the profile's model, so the next dictation just works.
• An update is now something you read before you take it. When 1AudioTool finds a newer signed release it opens a window with the version, when it was published, and the full release notes — headings, bullets, emphasis and any screenshots the release carried — then offers one button that downloads it and restarts. The download reports its size as it goes, and if anything fails it says so rather than leaving the button looking pressed. Later asks again next time you open the app; Skip this version stops that one release being offered at all. Either way Settings - General still has it, and asking for it there is what un-skips it. The check runs shortly after launch instead of only when you go looking, so the status line can say an update is waiting. On a first run it waits its turn behind the question about anonymous counts.

Improved

• The Inbox is now Review — the same clips waiting to be looked at and the same rules waiting to be learned, with the Analysis tab beside them.
• Closing the main window no longer stops dictation working. It hides, the tray brings it back, and in between the shortcut still starts and stops recordings. Quit still quits.
• The app stops drawing what nobody is looking at — a hidden window stops rendering instead of painting to a screen that is not there, a level meter releases the microphone when its panel is put away, and the timers in a window you cannot see stop counting. This was background processor use, on both platforms, for doing nothing.

Fixed

• Fixed every recording in a signed release failing with the microphone blocked, while System Settings showed 1AudioTool switched on — the shipped build did not declare the microphone the way macOS demands of a notarized app, so the toggle in Privacy & Security granted nothing and no prompt ever appeared. Release builds now declare it, and a release is checked for that declaration before it ships.
• Fixed the double tap not stopping a recording when permission arrived after launch — watching for the gesture needs Accessibility or Input Monitoring, and granting it used to take a restart before the gesture came alive. The watcher now starts within seconds of the grant, and a recording begun from inside the app can be stopped the way the overlay says it can.
• Speech models can now be downloaded from inside the app, so a first recording on a new install no longer fails with "whisper-cli was not found". The transcription path looked for an engine before it looked for a model, and reported a missing model as a missing developer tool. It now says that no model is installed and where to get one — and when the bundled engine has not finished loading the model, it waits for it rather than falling back to a command-line tool that packaged builds do not carry.

New

• Speaker separation in meetings — a Listen recording now shows who said what. Voices are told apart on this Mac after the meeting stops, each turn is attributed, and clicking a name renames that speaker everywhere in the transcript. Teach my voice records a few seconds of you and labels you Me instead of a number. Nothing is ever labelled Me until you enrol, and the voiceprint never leaves this Mac. Two engines, chosen per profile in Settings - Speech. Built-in needs nothing extra and separates an ordinary two- or three-person meeting. Speaker model is a download that is sharper on noisy calls and on voices that sound alike. Markers you drop during a meeting and the chapters built from them appear beside the speaker list, so a long recording can be read before it is replayed.
• Pick a microphone and see it working — the input picker in Dictate, Settings and the recording overlay lists every microphone by name and type, Built-in, Bluetooth, USB, Virtual or External, and draws a live level meter under the list. A microphone that another app is holding, or that has quietly stopped responding, is now visible before a recording is spent finding out. The picker is on the overlay while a dictation runs, so you can move to another microphone without losing what you have already said. When a capture fails, the same picker is on the failure card, and choosing an input there is what retries it.
• Create a profile from the sidebar — choosing "New profile" in the profile menu opens a name field in place. The new profile starts on the default settings and becomes active straight away, so a second voice or a different set of languages is a few keystrokes away. The free tier keeps one profile, and the menu explains what Pro adds rather than failing silently.

Improved

• The global gesture on macOS is Option twice, not Control twice. macOS binds double-Control to its own Dictation and keeps that binding even when Dictation is switched off, so reclaiming it meant swallowing every Control press system-wide and posting a synthetic one back a fraction of a second later. Nothing binds a bare double tap of Option, so the watcher now only listens: no modifier is ever swallowed or replayed, and Option-click, Option-drag and every Option chord are untouched. Existing profiles move across on their own. Windows keeps Control twice, where a lone Alt press would open the menu bar.
• Dictation is faster to finish — the model now loads while you are still speaking rather than after you stop, and it stays loaded between dictations, so the wait between finishing a sentence and seeing it appear went from about a second to about a fifth of one on the machine this was measured on. The timing, and how long the model stays loaded, are in Settings - Performance.
• The transcript reaches your cursor sooner — pasting used to wait for the history entry, the recording and the profile to be written first; now it goes first and the bookkeeping follows. Bringing your app back to the front no longer waits out a fixed pause, and no longer asks macOS for permission to control other applications.

Fixed

• Fixed dictation from the shortcut always failing when the app was not on screen — minimised, hidden behind another app, or on another Space, the shortcut would show the overlay with no timer, no microphone name and no input picker, then fail with "did not respond, on two attempts". The system will not open a microphone for a window that is not visible, and it does not refuse the request either; it simply holds it until the window comes back, which for a dictation into another app never happens. The recording overlay, which is on screen for exactly as long as a capture runs, now opens the microphone. Dictating from another app works the same way it does inside the app.
• Fixed the end of the last word being cut off — the final fraction of a second of every recording was dropped as the microphone was released. It is now waited for and included in the clip.
• Fixed the overlay going blank after the main window was reloaded — it stopped accepting updates for the rest of the session and showed a stale card.

New

• Fully local macOS dictation powered by whisper.cpp, with Verbatim and Clean output modes.
• Speaker profiles with per-profile languages, model selection, vocabulary, microphone choice, correction memory, and transcript history.
• A global Control-twice shortcut, floating recording overlay, clipboard delivery, and optional insertion into the previously active application.

Improved

• Accuracy defaults that match how people actually dictate — new profiles start on explicit English rather than auto-detect, because a short clip in accented English is easily classified as the speaker's first language. The app warns when a short recording still uses Auto-detect.
• Cleaner audio before transcription — recordings have DC offset removed, outside silence trimmed and conservative gain applied, and the app reports quiet, clipped or mostly-silent input instead of leaving it to look like a model failure.
• Speech enhancement is now a choice — browser echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain can smear consonants on some microphones, so each profile can A/B test it against the raw microphone.