What’s new

The last place a dictation could get stuck.

• Fixed: a dictation could stop at “Getting ready…” and stay there, with no way out but quitting fnTalk and opening it again. Every other step along the way already gave up and let you press the key again — switching on the microphone was the one that didn’t. Now it does, after a few seconds
• Nothing else changed — your settings, snippets and vocabulary come with you

The “Getting ready…” fix, properly this time.

• Fixed: a dictation could still stop at “Getting ready…” and stay there until you quit fnTalk and opened it again. 1.6 aimed at this and missed it. It now gives up after a few seconds and asks you to press the key again, so the worst case is pressing twice instead of restarting the app
• Nothing else changed — your settings, snippets and vocabulary come with you

Type a short abbreviation, get the whole paragraph.

• New in Settings ▸ Snippets: give any piece of text an abbreviation — .review, say — and typing that abbreviation puts the whole thing in its place, line breaks and all. Worth it for the paragraph you send after every shoot, a signature, or anything you retype more than twice
• It starts switched OFF. When it is on, it watches for a period at the start of a word followed by one of your own abbreviations, and drops everything else the instant it arrives — nothing you type is stored, and password fields are invisible to it
• Abbreviations are left alone in Terminal and anywhere else you name, since a period followed by letters is usually a file name there
• Your snippets live in the same file Thwack uses on the phone, so Import and Export move them between the two
• Fixed: now and then a dictation would stop at “Getting ready…” and stay there, and the only way out was quitting and reopening. It gives up after a few seconds now and asks you to press the key again

It stays running.

• Fixed: fnTalk could quit without warning while you were still talking, about once a day, and the sentence you were speaking never landed. It went quietly — no dialog, the menu bar icon simply gone — which is why it looked like the app had closed on its own. If you ever found yourself talking to a fnTalk that was not there, this was it
• Nothing else changed. Update whenever you like; your settings, profiles and vocabulary come with you

Your words go where you started talking.

• Hold the key, and the text lands in the field you started in — even if a build finishes, a window opens, or an app bounces up and takes the focus while you are mid-sentence. Before this it went wherever the focus ended up, which is how a sentence disappears or turns up somewhere it should not be
• Most of the time it slips the words in without disturbing anything, so whatever grabbed the focus keeps it. When the app you were typing in will not accept that quietly, it comes back to the front first
• If it genuinely cannot get back to where you started, it stops rather than pasting into whatever happens to be in front, and leaves the text on the clipboard for you
• Double-tap recording is deliberately different: it still lands wherever your cursor is when you tap to stop, because walking off to another app is the point of recording hands free

It stops waiting on a cloud that is not there.

• New in Settings ▸ Cloud: Auto. Cloud cleanup is used while the cloud is answering, and the moment it stops — a hotel network, a hotspot that has dropped, a flight — dictation goes local and stops waiting for it. It picks the cloud back up on its own once it returns, so there is nothing to switch back
• Before this, every dictation on a dead connection still sat out the full timeout before giving you your words. Nothing was ever lost, it just arrived a couple of seconds late, every single time
• It waits for a pattern rather than a blip: two failures in a row, not one, so an ordinary slow answer does not cost you the cloud. Choose “Always try” instead if you would rather it attempt every time
• The pill says which is happening — “local · no cloud” when the cloud has gone quiet, so that is never confused with an app you have set to stay local. Clicking it to send one sentence to the cloud still works
• Fixed: fnTalk could quit unexpectedly during a dictation, roughly once a day
• Fixed: updating fnTalk reset your settings. Your cloud switch, your profiles and your vocabulary now survive an update — this is the last version that will do that to you

The pill follows you between desktops.

• If you use more than one Mission Control desktop, the pill now appears on whichever one you are working on. Before this it stayed on the desktop it first appeared on, so sliding to the next one looked exactly like it had disappeared — dictation kept working the whole time, which is what made it so confusing
• 1.3 claimed to have fixed this and had not. This is the real one
• FamAlign is spelled correctly now when you say it

Every dictation says where it is going, and you can change your mind mid-sentence.

• The pill wears a mark from the moment you start talking: CLOUD in one corner, LOCAL ONLY in the other. You know where your words are going while you are still saying them, not afterwards
• Click that mark to switch this one over — send a normally-local app's text to the cloud, or keep a sentence off it. It shows as a distinct third state and lasts until you clear it or quit, because an override is for the sentence in front of you
• Cloud cleanup stops answering you. Dictating a question used to sometimes insert the answer to it; the request is now shaped so the text is data rather than a question, and a reply that looks like an answer instead of a tidy-up is discarded in favour of your own words
• See what cloud cleanup has cost, in Settings ▸ Cloud, counted from the token totals in each reply — the console reports per key, so it cannot tell you this if the key is shared
• Settings walks through getting an API key, including the part nobody explains: it is not your Claude or ChatGPT login, those are subscriptions and the API is a separate account
• Fixed: the pill sometimes stopped appearing while dictation carried on working perfectly
• Fixed: Settings hid its own tabs behind a menu, and could not be resized

Double-tap to record hands free.

• Double-tap the key and it keeps recording after you let go — one more tap stops it and inserts. For a thought that is longer than you want to hold a key through
• Holding still works exactly as before, so nothing you already do changes. The pill tells you which mode you are in
• Escape still throws a recording away, hands free or not
• Turn it off in Settings ▸ General if you would rather the key only ever means hold-to-talk

A meter that actually moves, a vocabulary that hears you, and Settings you can type into.

• The listening meter now radiates from the word itself: a loud syllable appears beside it and travels out to the edge. It also adapts to how loudly you have been speaking, so a quiet voice still fills it
• Drag the pill by the handle at the top, resize it from the corner, and it stays where you leave it
• Vocabulary matching listens to how a word SOUNDS, not just how it is spelled — so a name that came back close but wrong gets fixed, while ordinary words that merely look similar are left alone
• Custom vocabulary has its own tab, sorted alphabetically, with an add field that commits on Return and a list you can delete from
• Suggested words stopped offering noise: it no longer proposes short words the recognizer already spells correctly, or fragments of names you have added
• A space is added between two dictations, so a second thought no longer lands flush against the first
• Click any line in your history to copy it back to the clipboard
• Text fields in Settings accept typing — every one of them looked broken because the window was never taking keyboard focus

First release. Hold a key, talk, let go.

• Push-to-talk dictation that runs entirely on your Mac — no account, no upload, no internet
• The text appears wherever your cursor was, cleaned up according to which app you are in: shorter and more casual in Messages, full sentences in Mail, no trailing full stop in a terminal
• Punctuation works both ways at once. Your pauses become commas and full stops on their own, and saying “period” or “question mark” works too
• Names it keeps getting wrong go in a vocabulary list, fed to the recognizer before it decodes — add one from Settings, from any app's right-click Services menu, or from the menu bar
• Setup walks through the permissions macOS asks for and ends by watching a real dictation happen, so you know it works rather than being told
• 1.9 MB, because the speech model is the one already built into macOS