Product updates

Actions turn your voice into an edit command for text in any app. Highlight a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole draft, press the Actions hotkey (⌃⌥E by default), and say what you want — "make this shorter", "fix the grammar", "translate to Spanish", "turn this into bullet points". Epilude rewrites the selection in place and puts your clipboard back the way it was.

Turn Actions on in Settings → Actions — a short guided setup walks you through your first edit. Actions runs through the Epilude cloud, so you'll need Cloud mode and a signed-in account. See the Actions guide for the full walkthrough.

A transcription or cleanup request that hit a momentary network blip or a busy server used to fail outright, leaving you to redo the dictation. Epilude now retries automatically after a short pause, so a passing hiccup stays invisible instead of costing you a dictation.

This applies to Cloud mode transcription, cleanup, and Text-to-Speech.

Local Mode now runs Epilude Model 4.1, a refinement of Model 4. It's most noticeable on longer dictations, which used to occasionally ramble or repeat themselves — those now stay tight and faithful to what you said. On our internal benchmark it clears more of our quality bar than Model 4 did, in the same 1.5 GB download at the same speed.

If you already use on-device Cleanup on a 16GB+ Mac, a card on Home will let you know the new model is ready. You keep dictating with your current model until you upgrade with one tap.

When you reported a dictation that came out wrong, nothing on screen confirmed it had gone through. Now the dictation's flag icon fills in once you report it, so you can tell at a glance which ones you've already sent us. Hover it to report the same dictation again if something else needs flagging.

The change shows up everywhere your dictations are listed — both the Home dashboard and the All dictations view.

When you spoke numbers inside an ordinary sentence, Cleanup could mistake them for a list and break your text onto bullet points — "listed at nineteen fifty" or "roughly two hundred" might come back as a stray heading with a lone item beneath it.

Epilude now only starts a list when you're genuinely counting through items, and it leaves numbers that are quantities, times, or prices where they belong — in the sentence. Real lists you dictate still format as before.

When a new version of the on-device model shipped, Local Mode used to pause dictation until you downloaded it, even if the model you already had worked fine. Updates now work the way you'd expect: you keep dictating with your current model, a dismissible card on Home lets you know a newer one is available, and you upgrade when it suits you with one tap.

Settings also gained a model switcher: see which model is running, update in the background, and keep or remove older models after switching.

This applies to on-device Cleanup on 16GB+ Macs. Learn more about Local Mode.

Local Mode now runs Epilude Model 4, the fourth generation of our on-device model. Cleanup quality jumps exactly where it matters: mid-sentence self-corrections resolve correctly, dates and names survive intact, mixed-language sentences stay in the languages you spoke, and casual writing keeps your hedges. On our internal benchmark it makes 56 percent fewer critical meaning errors than Model 3, in the same 1.5 GB download at the same speed. If you already use Local Mode, the app will prompt you to re-download the model (about 1.6 GB). Read the full story in Introducing Epilude Model 4.

Dictating a plain number like "two million" in Local Mode could occasionally come out with a currency symbol you never spoke, such as "$2 million". Epilude now removes these invented symbols, while amounts you actually dictate as money ("four thousand dollars" becomes "$4,000") keep working exactly as before. Cloud mode was never affected.

The floating widget's hint could mention a keyboard shortcut for a feature that hasn't launched yet. The hint now lists only shortcuts for features available in your app.

We tuned Epilude to run lighter on your Mac. The hotkey setup screen is now smoother, and Epilude keeps a tidier footprint while it runs, so it stays quick and stays out of your way.

Very soft or distant speech could occasionally come back empty from cloud dictation, even when there was real audio to transcribe. Epilude now judges quiet speech relative to the loudest part of your recording, so a near-silent phrase is transcribed instead of being discarded as background noise.

We tightened a range of protections across the Epilude backend and web pages: stricter limits on sign-in and support requests, hardened handling of the pages that manage your session, and tighter controls on how our servers make outbound requests. Nothing changes in how you use Epilude.

The Recent dictations card on the home screen now opens into a full list of your dictation history. Every entry supports the same actions as the card: copy the text, compare it with the raw transcript, undo or redo Cleanup, or report a result that missed the mark.

Dictation history stays on your Mac.

Your dictation hotkeys, including Caps Lock, are now handled by a small dedicated helper that runs alongside Epilude. Keyboard monitoring this way can no longer interfere with typing in other apps, even in the rare cases where the main app is busy or restarting.

The helper registers itself, keeps itself up to date after app updates, and if it is ever unavailable Epilude falls back to handling hotkeys itself, so dictation keeps working either way. No setup needed.

Holding a modifier-only push-to-talk hotkey, such as Right Command, could end the dictation on its own after about a second even though you were still holding the key. The hold is now tracked correctly for as long as you keep the key down.

Local Mode now shows the on-device model you are actually running — Epilude Model 3 — in Settings, onboarding, and the download details. As the on-device model improves, the name you see will keep up with the version on your Mac.

You can now sign in to Epilude with your Google account. Pick Continue with Google on the app's sign-in screen or on the web dashboard, approve it in your browser, and you are signed in — no email code to wait for.

Signing in with email still works exactly as before, and both options connect to the same account. If you have been using email sign-in with your Gmail address, Continue with Google signs you into that same account.

New to Epilude? The quick start walks you through setup after you sign in.

When a new version of Epilude is available, the app now shows it right in the sidebar and in Settings, so you always know when there is an update to install instead of finding out later.

Picking your dictation language is clearer now. The language list shows every language Epilude supports, and in Local Mode the ones that need Cloud Mode to transcribe are marked "Cloud only" rather than quietly disappearing from the list.

So if a language you use isn't available on-device, you can see exactly why and switch to Cloud Mode for it, instead of wondering where it went.

Not everyone wants a subscription. Pay Once is a single $59 purchase that unlocks Local Mode: Epilude's fully on-device dictation and Cleanup, where your audio is processed right on your Mac and never leaves it. It works offline (the app just checks in occasionally when you're online), and your purchase includes a full year of app updates.

Cloud Mode, with the fastest transcription and our largest Cleanup models, still runs on Pro or your free trial. Pay Once covers everything that happens on-device.

Compare the plans to see how Pay Once and Pro line up.

Two hotkey fixes make push-to-talk dependable:

• Releasing always stops: rarely, letting go of your hotkey didn't end the dictation — it kept listening until you pressed again. Epilude now double-checks the real key state and stops within a second, even when macOS drops the release event.
• Works on more keyboards: hotkeys bound to a specific side, like Left ⌘, could silently never trigger on keyboards that don't report which side was pressed. They now work everywhere, while still respecting the side on keyboards that do.

Learn more about setting up your hotkey.

The "Warming up local model" wait after a break is mostly gone.

• Stays ready between dictations: on Macs with 16GB+ of memory, the on-device model now stays loaded while Epilude runs, instead of unloading after a few quiet minutes.
• Warms up while you speak: if the model does need to load, that now starts the moment you press your hotkey — so it happens while you're talking, not after you stop.
• Kinder to your Mac: when your system is genuinely low on memory, Epilude still steps aside and frees what it's using.

Learn more about Local Mode.

Dictating in the first seconds after Epilude launched could show a "trial ended" alert, even with an active subscription or trial — the app simply hadn't finished loading your account yet. Dictation now works right away while your account details load in the background.

Fixes for back-to-back dictations and slow Cleanup moments:

• No more crossed wires: if you started a new dictation while the previous one was still being cleaned up, the earlier text could get typed into whatever you'd switched to. A superseded result is now safely kept in your history instead of being inserted late.
• "Send text" always sends: when Cleanup ran into trouble and Epilude fell back to inserting your words as spoken, a trailing send text command was ignored — the message was typed but never sent. It now submits as expected.
• Cleanup can't stall: a cloud Cleanup that takes too long now times out quickly and inserts your dictation with basic formatting, instead of leaving you waiting.

Local Mode ships with an upgraded on-device Cleanup model. It follows your words more faithfully — keeping your meaning, wording, and language intact while stripping filler and fixing punctuation — and we now test every release against a suite covering lists, self-corrections, contractions, multiple languages, tone, and more, in both Cloud and Local Mode.

If you use Local Mode, Epilude fetches the updated model with a quick one-time download; everything stays on your Mac as always.

Learn more about Local Mode and Cleanup levels.

Cmd-Tabbing to the Epilude window could hitch for a moment while the app checked system settings behind the scenes. Those checks now run in the background, so the window responds immediately every time you switch to it.

Tapping a suggested word chip in Vocabulary opened an empty editor on the first try — you had to tap it twice to get the word filled in. The editor now opens pre-filled every time.

If you pressed your dictation hotkey in another app before finishing onboarding, nothing happened and Epilude looked broken. Now a Finish setting up Epilude card appears to bring you back to setup, so a missed keypress no longer looks like a bug.

Alerts also show up where you're actually working. Messages like a downloading on-device model, an expired trial, or a missing microphone now appear over the app you're in, instead of waiting until you switch back to Epilude.

Follow the quick start to finish setup.

The Epilude menu bar menu now shows a Dictation hint with your current hotkey, like "Hold your hotkey (fn) to start dictating". It reflects whatever you've set, so it updates when you change your hotkey in Settings.

The account line is clearer too: when you're signed out it now reads You're not logged in, instead of a misleading "Trial: 0d left".

Cleanup is more faithful to your meaning and formatting across every mode.

• Keeps your hedges: phrases like "I think", "I feel", "maybe", and "probably" are no longer treated as filler, so a tentative note stays tentative instead of hardening into a flat statement.
• Better capitalization: sentence starts, the word "I", and weekday names are capitalized reliably, even in Local Mode.
• Matches your tone: with an excited tone, statements end with an exclamation mark.
• Preserves line breaks: the way you broke your dictation into lines is kept in the result.

Filler words like "um", "uh", "like", and "you know" are still removed as before.

Learn more about Cleanup levels.

The dictation pill that sits at the bottom of your screen when you're not dictating is now more compact and rests closer to the bottom edge. It's less likely to cover text fields or buttons near the bottom of a window.

When you start dictating, the pill expands as before.

Your Home dashboard now shows total words, time saved, and average words per minute together in a single Your stats card, with your top sources and activity heatmap alongside it.

Your all-time word count is also more accurate. It now counts every day you have dictated, so the total reflects your full history instead of only your recent dictations.

Cleanup in Local Mode now stays faithful to your dictation. It strips filler and fixes punctuation and capitalization while keeping your meaning, wording, and language intact. Before, on-device Cleanup could rewrite what you said, and sometimes answer a question you dictated instead of tidying it up. Cloud mode was already accurate, and Local Mode now matches it.

Local Mode Cleanup also runs up to the Medium level now. High runs in Cloud mode only. If you have High selected and switch to Local Mode, Cleanup runs at Medium, and your High setting returns automatically when you switch back to Cloud mode.

Learn more about Cleanup levels and Local Mode.

Dictation now stays on your chosen microphone after you unplug it, reconnect it, or restart your Mac. Before, your saved mic could go stale on reconnect and Epilude would fall back to the wrong device, sometimes your Bluetooth headphones, and capture nothing useful.

If your preferred mic is unplugged, Epilude now steps through your microphone ranking instead of grabbing the system default, and re-selects your mic automatically when it comes back.

Pick your microphone in Settings → Audio → Microphone with a redesigned picker. Click Change to see your devices in one list, with a live level meter on the active mic so you can confirm it is hearing you before you dictate.

• Live input level on the selected microphone, so you can see it working
• Edit ranking to set a preference order, so Epilude uses the highest available mic and falls back on its own when one is unplugged
• Unavailable mics show the reason instead of disappearing, like your built-in mic when the laptop lid is closed

Your choice and ranking apply to every dictation.

You can now report a dictation that came out wrong, straight from the Home dashboard. Each recent dictation has a flag button that opens a short form where you can describe what you expected.

Your report includes that dictation's original and cleaned text, so we can see what happened and improve quality. No audio is included, and a dictation is only ever sent if you choose to report it.

Adding a description is optional. If you'd like a reply, you can reach us through the Help Center.

See exactly what Cleanup changed in any dictation. On the Home dashboard, open a recent dictation's menu and choose See what changed to compare your raw words with the cleaned version, with added and removed words highlighted inline.

If you prefer your original wording, Revert to raw keeps the raw transcript instead of the cleaned text. It doesn't change what was already inserted.

The option appears whenever Cleanup edited a dictation, so you can always check what it did and trust what Epilude inserts.

Learn more about Cleanup levels.

Send text is a new optional command: end a dictation with the words "send text" and Epilude sends the message for you, instead of typing those words. It inserts the rest of what you said, then presses Return.

It works where Return submits:

• Chat apps, terminals, and web chats like Slack, Messages, Terminal, and ChatGPT
• Single-line fields like a browser address bar or a search box

In editors and notes such as Word, Pages, and Notion, "send text" is typed as normal text and nothing is sent.

Send text is off by default. Turn it on in Settings → Dictation, under Dictation behavior, where you can also set specific apps to always or never send.

See Say "send text" to submit for details.

Vocabulary is now available to everyone. Teach Epilude how to spell the names, brands, acronyms, and jargon you use, and it gets them right on every dictation, in any app.

Add a word from the new Vocabulary sidebar section, quick-add a selected word from anywhere with ⌘⇧D, or bulk-import a list from another tool. Corrections run in both Cloud mode and Local Mode, so they work the same even when dictation stays fully on your Mac.

See Vocabulary for setup and tips.

Double-tapping your push-to-talk hotkey to start hands-free dictation is now more reliable, especially on Bluetooth keyboards. A slightly slow double-tap used to register as a single press and start a one-off dictation instead of switching to hands-free. Epilude now allows a little more time between the two taps.

Local Mode runs dictation entirely on your Mac. Choose it in Settings → Dictation, switch to Local Mode, download Epilude Model 1 once, and your audio and text never leave your device. It works offline, so you can dictate without a connection.

Cloud mode stays the default, with the broadest language support (35+ languages). Local Mode covers 25 European languages and needs an Apple Silicon Mac; full on-device Cleanup needs 16GB of memory or more. Switch between the two whenever you like.

See Local Mode for setup and details.

We also fixed an issue where text you dictated during the onboarding practice step appeared twice. Your practice text now inserts once, and onboarding no longer overwrites whatever you'd copied to your clipboard.

Empty dictations no longer insert stray text or overwrite your clipboard. If you start a dictation but stay silent, Epilude now leaves your text field and your clipboard untouched. Before, a silent dictation could paste a stray sentence or replace whatever you had copied.

If you keep Bluetooth earbuds connected for listening but dictate on a different microphone, like your Mac's built-in mic, dictation no longer stalls. Epilude was switching your earbuds into call mode on every press, adding a one-to-two second delay and sometimes dropping quick presses entirely. Now it only does that when the earbuds are actually the mic you're dictating with.

New installs now start with Left ⌘ + E as the push-to-talk hotkey. If you've already set your own, nothing changes.

You can also bind to a specific side of the keyboard. Set a hotkey to Left ⌘ or Right ⌘ (shown as L⌘ and R⌘) and it fires only when you press that physical key, leaving the other one free for other shortcuts. Record a new hotkey from Settings → Hotkeys and Epilude picks up which side you pressed automatically.

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 Cloud (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.