Kara 0.3.5

Fixed

• Release documentation updates the visible CPU/GPU installer filenames as well
  as their download URLs.
• Installed shortcuts, the executable and installers use the full Kara logo
  at every icon size, including the small Windows Start menu icon.
• Disabled text options in automatic language mode retain readable label contrast
  on the selected green background.
• The window header displays the full Kara logo. The recording indicator is now
  a plain green circle at rest and red while recording.
• Updated the website screenshots and animated demo to match the new indicators.
• Settings can now be dragged by its header, just like the main window.

Changed

• Release builds now clear PyInstaller intermediates and also detect Inno Setup 7.
• Added a public Google Search Console verification file to the Pages source.
• The website title, main heading, search and social descriptions, and README
  now identify Kara as a free offline Whisper dictation app for Windows.
• Prepared the domain-root robots.txt for publication through the GitHub Pages
  user-site repository; the project site's /kara/robots.txt does not serve
  as the host-root crawler configuration.
• Documented an isolated Windows development environment and excluded the local
  development shortcut from Git.
• Clarified the development checkout and the separate build and publication
  workflow in the repository instructions.
• Releases now upload the locally validated installers; pushing a tag no longer
  rebuilds or publishes them through GitHub Actions.

Removed

• Removed unused constants and unused PNG/SVG logo outputs; the logo generator
  retains the Windows icon, website logo and social preview.
• Removed the historical 0.3.2 automatic-language validation report.

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Download: Kara-Setup-0.3.5.exe — Windows 10 and 11.

NVIDIA GPU edition: Kara-Setup-GPU-0.3.5.exe.

Compare its SHA256 with SHA256SUMS.txt on the release page. The install guide walks through it and shows how to check the file's SHA256 against SHA256SUMS.txt below.

Kara v0.3.4

Changed

• The website now publishes robots.txt with its sitemap location so crawlers
  can discover its public pages.
• Two self-contained installers. Kara-Setup is the CPU edition and
  Kara-Setup-GPU includes CUDA for compatible NVIDIA cards. They share their
  installation, settings and downloaded models, so either edition can replace
  the other without losing user data.
• CUDA is no longer downloaded from Settings. This removes the release-asset
  dependency that could reject an otherwise valid NVIDIA download.

Fixed

• The release build no longer fails while updating the install guide's
  installer-size metadata.
• Diagnostics now trace press-to-record timing for mouse hotkeys, matching the
  keyboard path.
• The diagnostics report no longer counts the same trace again when an export
  ZIP and its extracted copies are analysed together.

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Download: Kara-Setup-0.3.4.exe � Windows 10 and 11.

Compare its SHA256 with SHA256SUMS.txt on the release page. The install guide walks through it and shows how to check the file's SHA256 against SHA256SUMS.txt below.

Kara v0.3.3

Changed

• One installer for every PC. Kara-Setup installs CPU support everywhere.
  On an NVIDIA PC, Settings offers to download the optional GPU support after
  Kara is installed, so no one has to choose between CPU and GPU downloads.
• The optional GPU package is verified for its exact version, byte count and
  SHA-256 before Kara extracts it. A damaged or altered package is rejected and
  Kara continues to work on the processor.
• Choosing “Start Kara when Windows starts” now creates the standard Windows
  HKCU\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run entry. Uninstalling
  removes it and also cleans up the legacy 0.3.2 Startup-folder shortcut.

Security

• The release build prepares Authenticode signing for Kara, its installer and
  uninstaller when a code-signing provider is configured. Production signing
  still requires the maintainer's certificate or signing service credentials;
  without them, releases remain unsigned.

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Download: Kara-Setup-0.3.3.exe — Windows 10 and 11.

Compare its SHA256 with SHA256SUMS.txt on the release page. The install guide walks through it and shows how to check the file's SHA256 against SHA256SUMS.txt below.

Kara v0.3.2

Automatic dictation language is back: switch between Spanish and English
dictations without changing Settings.

Added

• Automatic dictation language, now the default for new settings. Existing
  language choices are preserved. Whisper detects the language of each dictation.
• Automatic keeps Whisper's punctuation and numbers, with generic spacing and
  capitalization cleanup. It does not apply Kara's extra number conversions,
  spoken commands or Spanish opening marks to mixed speech. Those controls are
  disabled in Automatic; their saved choices return with a fixed language.
• Diagnostics distinguish automatic mode from the initially detected language;
  the initial language is not a label for the whole mixed recording.

Note

• Mixing languages in one recording can cause errors, including omitted or
  translated passages. Selecting a fixed language can improve accuracy,
  especially on short recordings. Reliable mixed-language dictation is not
  promised by this release.

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Download: Kara-Setup-0.3.2.exe — Windows 10 and 11.

Windows will show a blue "Windows protected your PC" box, because the installer is not signed. Click More info, then Run anyway. The install guide walks through it and shows how to check the file's SHA256 against SHA256SUMS.txt below.

Kara v0.3.1

Kara's own text — buttons, labels, hints, messages — was English no matter what
you dictated in. This release fixes that: the installer now offers all six
languages Kara already speaks, and the choice carries into the app itself, not
just into what it types for you.

Added

• The installer's own language picker now sets Kara's UI language. Choose
  Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, German or Italian at setup, and every
  label, button, menu and message in Kara comes up in that language — separate
  from the LANGUAGE setting, which is still just what you dictate in.
• An APP LANGUAGE selector in Settings, so the UI language can be changed
  later without reinstalling. Applies right away, the same as the theme switch.

Note

• Spanish and English were written and checked by hand. Portuguese, French,
  German and Italian are a first-pass translation — flag anything that reads
  oddly and it'll get fixed in a follow-up patch.

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Download: Kara-Setup-0.3.1.exe — Windows 10 and 11.

Windows will show a blue "Windows protected your PC" box, because the installer is not signed. Click More info, then Run anyway. The install guide walks through it and shows how to check the file's SHA256 against SHA256SUMS.txt below.

Kara v0.3.0

Two beta testers said the app was slow and lost words. Both of them turned out to
be running the smallest model on their processors — one of them on an RTX 3060 —
because the download left the CUDA libraries out and hid the graphics card option
along with them. So the first thing this release fixes is not the speed. It is
that nobody, the developer included, could tell what they were actually running.

Added

• A second installer, for NVIDIA cards. Kara-Setup-GPU carries the CUDA
  libraries, which is why it weighs about 570 MB against 72 MB, and on a card
  it is not a small difference. Nothing else is needed: no CUDA Toolkit, no separate
  download, just a current driver. Either installer can be run over the other and
  they share their settings. AMD and Intel cards are still not supported, because
  ctranslate2 has no backend for them on Windows.
• Numbers are typed as numbers. "mil doscientos pesos" comes out as
  1200 pesos, "son las tres cuarenta y cinco" as son las 3:45, "tres coma cinco"
  as 3,5 and "un veinte por ciento" as un 20%. Spanish and English. A bare "un",
  "una" or "uno" is left alone, because those are articles and pronouns far more
  often than they are the number one. Settings -> TEXT turns it off.
• Spoken punctuation. Say "punto y aparte", "nueva linea", "abre parentesis"
  or "signo de interrogacion" and you get the punctuation rather than the words.
  Only phrases nobody says by accident: plain "coma" and "punto" are ordinary
  Spanish, so they live behind the "all" setting and are off by default.
• Opening question and exclamation marks. Whisper supplies the closing one and
  drops the opener perhaps half the time; a Spanish sentence ending in ? now gets
  its inverted mark back.
• Export diagnostics, in Settings. Writes a zip with a report on the machine
  (processor, graphics card, microphones and their audio backends, resolved
  device and model, library versions), the settings as saved, and the timing log.
  Then it opens the folder and stops: nothing is sent, and the file is yours to
  pass on or delete.

Changed

• The graphics card option now appears whenever a graphics card can be used.
  Until now the packaged build hid it unconditionally and forced Device back to
  auto, because no packaged build could use a card. That was true, and it was
  also why two beta testers spent an evening reporting that the app was slow and
  lost words while both of them ran the smallest model on their processors -- one
  of them on an RTX 3060, with everyone involved, the developer included,
  believing the card was in use. The three places that inferred this from "is
  this a packaged build" now ask whether the CUDA libraries load.

• Auto no longer refuses large-v3-turbo unless 6 GB of video memory is free.
  Its weights are about 1.6 GB, so the old threshold was several times what it
  needs, and the effect was that any card with a browser open fell all the way
  to small. The scale is now 2.5 GB for large-v3-turbo and 1.2 GB for
  small. There is deliberately no medium step between them: it wants as much
  memory as large-v3-turbo while being both slower and less accurate, so
  anywhere medium would fit, the better model fits too.

• The timing log now runs always, rather than only when the KARA_DEBUG_LOG
  environment variable was set. Nobody was ever going to run setx before using
  a dictation tool, which meant the machines that were slow were exactly the ones
  that had recorded nothing. It is capped at 2 MB, it still records timings and
  device names and never what was said, and Kara still has no way to send it.
  KARA_DEBUG_LOG is ignored from now on, since there is nothing left for it
  to switch on; KARA_MACHINE still names the machine inside the file.

• ctranslate2 gets one thread per physical core, up to eight, instead of the
  four it defaults to regardless of the machine.

• Beam width is 1 on the processor and stays at 5 on a graphics card. Beam 5
  weighs five candidate transcriptions for what is usually a comma's worth of
  difference, and on a processor that is most of the wait.

• Silence is trimmed before transcription. Push-to-talk recordings start and end
  with some, because the key goes down before you speak and up after you stop.

  Together those three take a 66-second recording on a six-core processor from
  14.8s to 9.1s, with byte-identical output on the test sample.

• Whisper is now primed with a formatted sentence before long recordings, on
  the theory that it copies the punctuation style of whatever it is primed with.
  Said plainly: this could not be shown to help. On 66 seconds of clean, well
  articulated speech the output was byte-identical with and without it. The case
  it is aimed at is fast unpunctuated speech, which is the one case a synthesised
  test voice cannot produce, so it ships unproven. It is skipped on recordings
  under three seconds, where it was measured steering the result somewhere worse
  and where there is no punctuation to recover anyway.

Fixed

• Dictating no longer wipes the clipboard when it held an image or a copied
  file. The old code read the clipboard as text, got an empty string back, and
  wrote that empty string over the picture once the paste was done.

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Download: Kara-Setup-0.3.0.exe — Windows 10 and 11.

Windows will show a blue "Windows protected your PC" box, because the installer is not signed. Click More info, then Run anyway. The install guide walks through it and shows how to check the file's SHA256 against SHA256SUMS.txt below.

Kara v0.2.4

The window stopped looking like a Tk utility and started looking like the thing
the website advertises.

Added

• Rounded corners on the window itself, through DwmSetWindowAttribute on
  Windows 11 and a SetWindowRgn region on Windows 10. The window is
  borderless, which means Windows does not round it for free.
• The brand mark in the header, in place of a plain bullet. It turns red while
  recording. It is the same drawing as the tray icon, rendered by the app rather
  than loaded from a file.
• Everything you have dictated stays in the window, newest at the bottom.
• Developer instrumentation behind the KARA_DEBUG_LOG environment variable,
  timing each step between the key going down and the window saying LISTENING.
  It writes to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Kara\trace.jsonl, records durations and device
  names but never what was said, has no network code, and is off unless that
  variable is set.

Changed

• The main view is flat. No cards, no boxes inside the window: the window is the
  card. Two bordered panels stacked inside one window read as two windows.
• Sentences you dictated are 11pt and white; the app's own lines are 9pt and
  grey. Ready to use. lost its lime, since it was the brightest thing on
  screen for a line that only means the model finished loading. Failures keep
  their red.
• The website shows photographs of the real window where it used to animate a
  CSS drawing of an older one.
• Download links carry the version, so the file that lands in your Downloads
  folder is Kara-Setup-0.2.4.exe rather than an undated Kara-Setup.exe.

Removed

• The typing animation and its caret. It delayed text that had already been
  pasted into the other window, and then replaced it with the next sentence.
• The separate history view and the button that opened it, now that the history
  is simply there.
• The winget manifests, the package submissions, and every mention of winget on
  the site and in the README. The package was never merged and is not being
  pursued.

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Download: Kara-Setup-0.2.4.exe — Windows 10 and 11.

Windows will show a blue "Windows protected your PC" box, because the installer is not signed. Click More info, then Run anyway. The install guide walks through it and shows how to check the file's SHA256 against SHA256SUMS.txt below.

Kara v0.2.3

Full Changelog: v0.2.2...v0.2.3

Kara v0.2.2

Full Changelog: v0.2.1...v0.2.2

Kara v0.2.1

Full Changelog: v0.2.0...v0.2.1