Speaker separation, a microphone picker and sentence-by-sentence transcription

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.

Long dictations no longer make you wait at the end — each sentence is transcribed during the pause that follows it, so when you stop, only the last one is left. On a recording of about a minute and a quarter the wait after stopping went from 2.7 seconds to a third of a second, and it no longer grows with how long you spoke. With live text turned on, each sentence appears in the overlay as it lands. It needs the quality model loaded, and it can be turned off in Settings - Performance - Transcribe as you speak.

Dictate again from the result card — the card that shows a finished transcript starts the next dictation, without reaching for the shortcut. Double-clicking the transcript there opens it for correction.

Discard a recording from the tray — Escape only reaches a window that has focus, which is never the case when you dictate into another app.

Windows support — the double-Control gesture, insertion at the caret in the app you were last in, spoken responses through the system voice, and the folder picker all run natively. Releases now carry a Windows installer alongside the macOS bundles, with the same update signature. It is not Authenticode-signed yet, so SmartScreen warns on first run.

The Inbox pages — Needs review, Learning, saved rules and Sources each show a page at a time with Previous and Next. A full Inbox used to build a transcript editor and an audio player for all 500 clips before it would draw.

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.

A profile that names a model you do not have now corrects itself — it used to surface, after a whole recording was spoken, as a microphone error. The choice is matched against what is actually installed and written back, so Settings shows the model that is really being used.

Copying on Windows keeps every character — text outside the system's console character set, accents, Vietnamese and emoji, now copies intact, and pasting no longer waits out a fixed pause before it starts.

Saving after a clip no longer rewrites your whole history — transcripts are stored separately from the profile, so the pause some people saw a moment after pasting is gone. Existing history moves across the first time this version opens it.

The Inbox holds less memory — recordings are read only when their row scrolls into view, and a list releases the recordings the previous render held. Re-rendering the Inbox used to leak one copy of every clip's audio.

Settings are written once per pause rather than once per change.

The interface is rebuilt, and everything carries over — profiles, transcripts, correction rules, packs, appearance and your licence are untouched, and the app reads exactly the same files on disk it did before. Each space now loads when you open it, so the window is ready sooner and stays lighter.

Supporting text in the rail and panels is a shade darker — it was just under the contrast a small grey label needs to be comfortably readable.