Product updates

Shortcuts now expand only when the trigger is the entire dictation, not when the same phrase appears inside a longer sentence. Saying "let me give my intro to the team" no longer triggers your "my intro" shortcut. Only saying "my intro" on its own does.

This makes shortcuts safe to use with short, natural phrases like "my email" or "office address" without worrying about false expansions during normal speech. To use a shortcut, press your hotkey, say the trigger, and release. Trailing punctuation and surrounding whitespace are ignored, so a period added by Smart Formatting still matches.

Shortcuts are now available to everyone. Save a short trigger like /sig or "office address", and Epilude expands it to the full text every time you dictate the trigger — in any app, at any Cleanup level.

Shortcuts live in the new Shortcuts sidebar section. Triggers are case-insensitive. The new help article at epilude.com/help/dictation/shortcuts walks through setup and tips for picking good triggers.

New branding: New app icon, menu bar icon, and in-app logo.

Cleanup tuning: Cleanup output reads more like your own writing across every level. Higher levels still rephrase for clarity, with less of the generic rewriting that made dictation feel processed.

Batch-mode widget fix: The dictation widget no longer disappears mid-flow when transcription is delivered all at once at the end of a dictation. The hide-on-failure heuristic now keys off whether audio was captured this session, not whether a partial transcript arrived.

Fixes addressed: Cleanup setting cards no longer stretch into the wizard footer, What's New always refreshes before showing.

Cleanup replaces the older Smart Formatting, LLM post-processing, and Raw STT toggles with a single four-level dial: None, Light, Medium, or High. Higher levels apply more LLM rewriting on top of the raw transcript. None inserts the verbatim transcript without any cleanup.

Cleanup composes with Tone Match, so Medium inside your Apple Mail tone still produces full-sentence prose while None inside your iMessage tone stays terse and uncorrected. If the LLM is unreachable (signed out or offline), dictation falls back automatically to the raw transcript.

Every dictation now keeps both the raw and cleaned versions. Hover a row on the Home dashboard, click ⋯, and pick Undo AI edit to flip to the raw text, Redo AI edit to restore the cleanup, Copy raw, or Delete. Configure Cleanup from Settings → Tone Match → Cleanup, or as the new fifth step of the Tone Match setup wizard.

Tone Match is now available to everyone. Configure how dictated text is formatted per app — terse and lowercase for iMessage, full sentences for Apple Mail, code-aware in your editor — and Epilude applies the right tone based on the frontmost app or browser tab.

After your first dictation post-onboarding, a one-time nudge on the Home dashboard points to the setup wizard. Existing users keep their current formatting, with the nudge auto-dismissed on upgrade.

Tone Match lives in Settings → Tone Match. The new help article at epilude.com/help/dictation/tone-match covers per-category setup and how window-title detection picks a tone for web apps.

The Home dashboard now shows your dictation activity at a glance: total words, time saved, average words per minute, a 12-month activity heatmap, and the apps you've dictated into most over the last 7 days. Tiles update live after each dictation, and a streak strip recognizes consecutive days without nagging about gaps.

All stats are stored on your Mac. Nothing leaves your device. To turn them off, toggle Settings → General → Track local dictation stats.

Settings consolidation: Dictation preferences that previously lived on their own page now sit inside the main Settings modal alongside Hotkeys, Audio, and General. Clearing dictation history asks for confirmation first.

Improvements included: light-mode contrast across settings and shared chrome, What's New window centering on the main app window, inline status labels on dictation rows so the warning icon explains itself, and heatmap empty-cell contrast in light mode.

The dictation widget has a new pill design with unified chrome across recording, refining, and error states. The refining state cycles through what the model is doing (tidying, formatting, applying your tone) instead of showing a generic spinner, and errors now surface inline on the pill rather than as a separate alert.

The pill and its tooltip are now separate panels, so hovering for shortcut hints no longer disturbs the recording animation.

Mic-level waveform: The waveform is shaped as a center-out FM sine bulge that responds to your voice, and now stays visible for the entire recording rather than being toggleable. The toggle has been removed from settings.

Onboarding model picker: A new step asks whether you want Remote (faster, more accurate, requires an internet connection) or Local processing before you reach the hotkey setup.

Hotkey recorder: Capture race conditions on fast multi-key presses are fixed, and the virtual keyboard now tints multi-combo bindings so each key in the combo is visible at a glance.

Onboarding now opens with a live dictation demo on the sign-in screen, so the first thing you see is Epilude working on real text rather than a static screenshot.

The hotkey step uses a new virtual keyboard that highlights your configured combo, tracks live key presses, and distinguishes the configured key from the one you're pressing right now. Reassigning the press-to-dictate hotkey from Settings → Hotkeys uses the same picker.

A short hands-free practice step lets you try a real dictation inside onboarding before finishing setup. Caps Lock is now the default press-to-dictate trigger for fresh installs, and a single tap ends a hands-free dictation cleanly.

Resolved an intermittent issue where automatic updates could occasionally stall during installation. The update process is now more reliable across all system configurations.

Also improved dictation resilience during long sessions — in rare cases, transcription could stop responding if the app had been open for an extended period. Epilude now seamlessly refreshes its connection in the background.

You can now see what's new in Epilude directly from the sidebar — no need to visit the website.

We've also tidied up a few things around the app, including clearer trial status messaging and some small UI polish across settings and onboarding.

Fixed several issues that could cause audio to stop working or behave unpredictably:

• Microphone crashes: Resolved a crash that could occur after a few seconds of dictation on certain microphone setups, particularly with macOS aggregate audio devices
• Speech detection: The speech gate was too aggressive on built-in microphones, sometimes filtering out actual speech. Dictation now reliably picks up your voice at normal speaking levels
• Device selection: Epilude no longer changes your system-wide audio input when selecting a microphone — other apps are unaffected
• Dictation widget: Fixed the widget not appearing when you first launch Epilude

If you previously experienced audio issues with your built-in microphone, these fixes should resolve them. No settings changes needed.

Your dashboard now shows your last 10 dictations in a scrollable list, replacing the single "Latest dictation" card.

Each entry includes:

• Preview: See the first few lines of each dictation at a glance
• Expand: Click any entry to view the full text
• Copy: Copy individual dictations with one click
• Timestamps: See when each dictation was recorded

Your history is saved locally and persists between sessions. To clear it, go to Settings → General and click Clear dictation history.