1.8.3

OpenWhispr 1.8.3

Note: 1.8.2 was never published — this release includes everything from it. If you're updating from 1.8.1, all of the below is new to you.

🌟 Highlights

🖊 Edit highlighted text by voice

Select text in any app, trigger the voice agent, and say what you want changed — "make this more formal", "fix the grammar", "turn this into bullet points". The agent rewrites the selection in place instead of pasting a new block. Works even in apps whose accessibility trees stay dormant (Arc, Chrome, Slack, VS Code, Claude Desktop, and more).

🖥 Screen context for the voice agent

Turn on "Share screen context" (Settings → AI Models → Voice Agent, off by default) and the agent sees the display you're working on when you speak — so "reply to this email" or "explain the error on screen" just works. You can route screenshot-carrying commands to a dedicated vision model, and a screenshot that can't be sent never costs you the command. Screenshots live in memory for one request only — never written to disk, stored, or logged.

📅 Microsoft & Apple Calendar

Outlook and Apple Calendar join Google Calendar: your meetings are detected, reminders fire before they start, and meeting notes link to the right event. Google Calendar sync also now handles large calendars completely.

✨ Also new (from 1.8.2)

• Collaboration is free — Any signed-in account can create and join team spaces, share individual notes, and sync shared content. Paid workspaces see prorated seat costs before inviting.
• Managed Enterprise AI — Organizations can centrally configure Amazon Bedrock or Azure OpenAI for cleanup, voice agent, notes, and translation. Employees sign in with company SSO — no cloud keys to handle — and prompts go directly to the organization's cloud account.
• Organization policy, fully enforced — Policy now applies across the whole app: restricted options are hidden with safe fallbacks, and enforcement covers modes, providers, features, sharing, and retention.
• Tinfoil realtime meeting transcription — Tinfoil joins the realtime meeting providers.
• Agent failures are no longer silent — If the agent can't process a command, you get an "Agent Unavailable" notice instead of your raw words pasting into whatever app you were in.

⚡ GPU acceleration you can trust (new in 1.8.3)

• "GPU acceleration active" now means it. The indicator reflects what the transcription engine is actually running on — ready, activating, active, or "could not be activated" with a Retry — instead of turning green whenever a download finished.
• Enable GPU works instantly. Downloading or removing a GPU pack applies immediately — no app restart, no silent CPU fallback.
• A GPU failure never costs you a dictation. If the GPU engine crashes, the same recording is transcribed on CPU and pasted, and the failed backend is remembered instead of being retried on every launch.
• GTX 10-series (Pascal) cards can now use CUDA. The CUDA pack ships Pascal kernels for the first time; cards the build can't run on (Maxwell and older) are offered the Vulkan pack that works — no more loading the model and crashing at first use.
• GPU packs can no longer corrupt each other. Each pack installs into its own directory, installs are atomic (a power cut can't leave a half-installed pack), and old installs are healed automatically.

🔒 Your keys and audio stay where you point them (new in 1.8.3)

• Custom endpoints fail closed. A missing or invalid custom URL for speech-to-text or AI cleanup now fails with a clear error instead of silently sending your audio, prompt, and API key to OpenAI. ⚠️ Action required: if you use the Custom provider and never changed its pre-filled URL, set a real endpoint under Settings — or switch to the OpenAI provider.
• Keys are scoped and stored securely. Your cleanup key no longer rides along to other endpoints, and custom-endpoint keys moved from plaintext into the OS secure store (migrated automatically).
• Every provider remembers its model. Switching providers and back — for transcription and all six AI scopes — restores your previous choice instead of resetting it.
• Transcription errors tell the truth. A broken transcription engine now reports a real error and keeps the recording for retry, instead of blaming your microphone with "No Audio Detected."

🛠 Fixes & polish

• Dictation — No more clipped first words, realtime streaming waits for your final words instead of racing a timer, voice activity detection is now opt-in, dropped transcript segments are retried and surfaced, and transcripts are no longer replaced unexpectedly.
• Meetings & speakers — Speaker labels you set stay put across live and offline identification, live speaker identification lands on Windows, your own dictation no longer triggers meeting detection, diarization writes land on the right note, meeting prompts are steadier, and realtime streams stop cleanly. Intel Mac meetings no longer fail at startup.
• Notes & sync — Cloud sync can't overwrite your local edits with an empty copy, deleted notes can't resurrect, edits made mid-save stay pending, and idle collaboration sync backs off politely.
• Launch at login on Linux — With correct behavior across GNOME and KDE, joining macOS and Windows (which also got start-hidden fixes).
• macOS — The Globe hotkey no longer also opens the system emoji/input switcher.
• Linux — Meeting notifications stay clickable, and the text monitor builds correctly against AT-SPI2.
• Interface — Markdown exports get correct timestamps, empty states close their gaps, the "Coming Soon" badge translates again, and hotkeys with left/right modifiers parse correctly.

🙏 Thanks

Thanks to @Chadpiha, @hsusul, @xAlcahest, @greatcoat, @boseq, and @stantheman0128 for their work on this release — and a warm welcome to first-time contributors @iSparsh and @edwin-luu! 🎉