1.42.0

Chalant 1.42.0

You pick the ear, you pick the key, and nothing you say disappears without
being told where it went.

One ear instead of two, and it is yours to choose

Until now Chalant ran a second, careful ear alongside the first and made them
agree before your words landed. It found real mistakes. It also made you wait:
on the two dictations there is a measurement for, the pause between letting go
and seeing words was about three and a half seconds, against under half a
second on the build before. And on nearly half of sentences the two ears wrote
exactly the same thing, so nearly half of that waiting bought nothing.

So the second ear is a choice now rather than something running behind every
sentence. Settings has a Recognizer picker with three, and each says what it
costs:

• Apple is macOS's own. Nothing to download, and it starts instantly.
• Parakeet is a stronger model that runs on this Mac. About 470 MB once.
• Whisper is the ear Chalant used to run second. About 606 MB once. It is
  the only one that can be told your names before it listens, and the slowest
  of the three by about three quarters of a second a sentence.

If you had Better hearing switched on, you are on Whisper: that is the
model you chose and downloaded, and it did not seem right to move you off it
without asking. If it feels slow now, Apple is one click away and there is
nothing to download.

Apple is the default on a fresh install, and that was a measurement rather
than a preference. All three were run over sixty recordings of real speech
with known correct text, and on this voice Apple needed fewer corrections than
Parakeet and needs no download. Whisper needed the fewest of all, and takes
about six times as long per sentence to do it. Your voice is not that voice, so
the picker is there.

Numbers written the way you say them now come out the way you meant them on
Parakeet: "one hundred and twenty dollars" becomes $120, "three fifteen"
becomes 3:15.

Option and the arrow keys stop starting a dictation

This one had been there a long time. Option+arrow moves the cursor by word,
Option+Delete deletes a word, Option+e starts an accented character, and every
one of them is a press of the same key you hold to talk. So every one of them
lit the strip, woke the microphone, and paused whatever you were listening
to, then undid it a moment later.

Now pressing any other key while the hold key is down means you wanted that
shortcut. Chalant stands down, types nothing, and says nothing. And nothing is
shown, paused or loaded at all until the key has been held long enough to mean
something, so a shortcut costs you nothing on the way past. Your microphone
still starts recording at the instant you press, so speaking immediately still
works.

If it is still in the way, the key can move. Settings offers Right Option,
Right Command, Right Control and Fn as well.

Nothing vanishes in silence

There were four ways a dictation could end with nothing typed, nothing on your
clipboard, and nothing said. The commonest was the worst: you spoke, the light
went out, and nothing happened, which is indistinguishable from the app being
broken.

• Nothing heard now says so, and says which kind of silence it was: it did not
  catch you, or your microphone itself heard nothing and which one it is.
• Switching app before letting go used to lose the sentence outright. Your
  words go to the clipboard, you are told, and there is a Retry that types
  them into wherever you have moved to.
• When words cannot be typed, you get the reason, a copy button and that same
  retry, instead of one clipped line in the corner.

The light waits with you

The strip used to disappear the moment you let go, while everything after that
happened in the dark. Now it goes still and dim until your words are actually
somewhere. It does not spin, travel or announce itself.

"New paragraph" works

Saying "new paragraph" or "new line" has always been understood by the optional
rewriting pass, which most people have switched off, so most of the time it
typed the words "new paragraph" into your document. It is a plain rule now and
works whatever your rewriting setting is. Sentences about text are safe: "add a
new line to the file" still says exactly that.

Under the hood

Chalant now checks that a paste actually arrived where apps will tell it, and
never pastes twice when it cannot be sure, so text can no longer be doubled by
a retry. Restoring your clipboard after a dictation no longer overwrites
something you copied in the meantime. And the on-device rewriting model is no
longer loaded on every keypress in a mode that was never going to call it.

Still true

Everything you say is turned into text on this Mac. Nothing is uploaded, no
account, no keys. The models download once, from Apple and from Hugging Face,
and then never again.

1.41.0

Chalant 1.41.0

Your words land sooner, because the careful ear stops reading a list it does
not need.

Names are handed over only when you might have said one

Chalant knows your vocabulary: the names you typed in, and the ones it has
learned from your corrections. Before the careful ear listens, it reads that
list, so it can spell Kizu and Capgemini the way you mean them.

It was reading the whole list on every sentence, whether or not a name was in
it. "My FNOPD just started" was arriving with sixteen names attached. Reading
them is not free: each one is a fraction of a second of the pause before your
words appear, and that pause sits between you and the screen.

Now the list is chosen by what you actually said. Names that sound like nothing
in the sentence stay home. On ordinary speech that is about four tenths of a
second off every sentence.

Nothing about your names got looser. Every name that was being rescued before
is still rescued: "send the challenge build" still becomes "send the Chalant
build", "Keeju" still becomes "Kizu". That was checked against your own
recordings rather than assumed, and the list is only trimmed to the point where
nothing was lost.

A name that arrives in two pieces

The first ear writes Capgemini as two words, "cap Gemini". Chalant already knew
how to put a split name back together, but it was skipping any pair where one
half was very short, and "cap" is three letters. So the two halves were never
joined, and a name that matches perfectly was never offered to either ear.

Overleaf, Capgemini and anything else your first ear breaks in two now find
their way back.

Still true

The careful ear still settles the sentence with the first one before anything
is typed, and still cannot invent a word, overrule a confident hearing, change
a number or touch a name you have taught it.

1.40.0

Chalant 1.40.0

The right words the first time, and an app that does not quietly disappear.

Both ears agree before your words land

Chalant has always had a second, more careful ear. Until now it only ever
spoke up after your words had already arrived, so its corrections showed up a
second or two late, or in apps with no safe undo they were worked out and then
thrown away. Over one week of real use that was 57 corrections computed and
binned.

Now both ears listen to the same sentence and settle it before anything is
typed. One clean version lands.

What that means in practice, taken from real dictations that used to go wrong:
"a recruiter" no longer arrives as "agriculture", "commas" no longer as
"commerce", "the option button" no longer as "the auction button". A sentence
where you said "I don't want the box" no longer lands as "I want the box".

The trade is a short wait when the two ears disagree. When they agree, which is
most of the time, nothing changes.

It knows when to leave your words alone

The careful ear does not get to win every argument. It cannot invent a word,
overrule a confident hearing, change a number, touch a name you have taught
Chalant, or quietly swap one small connecting word for another. Those limits
were not guesses: forty of your own recordings were played back and judged by
ear, and the rules were set by what actually sounded right.

A name is learned the first time it is heard

A name comes out differently wrong every time, so waiting to see the same
mistake twice meant waiting for something that never happened. When Chalant
writes something that is not a word and the careful ear hears a real one, it
learns it there and then.

It comes back when macOS stops it

macOS stops background apps when memory runs short, and it had started doing
that to Chalant. There is no crash, no warning, and nothing on screen to show
it happened: you press the key and nothing occurs.

Chalant now returns on its own when the system stops it. Quitting it yourself
still quits it, and it stays quit.

It rests when you are not using it

After a long silence Chalant puts its speech model down and picks it up again
the next time you dictate. It uses far less memory while it sits idle, which is
what made the system reach for it in the first place. The first thing you say
after a long gap lands without the second ear, and everything after that has it
back.

Under the hood

Chalant now refuses to run twice. Two copies would both answer the dictation
key and both paste, which is where doubled text came from.

1.39.0

Chalant 1.39.0

Your names, your long thoughts, and a quieter way to see it listening.

The names you say are the names it writes

Chalant was refusing to fix a name that sounded close but not exact, so
your own contacts came back mangled. It now trusts a closer match,
because a separate safeguard already makes sure it can never rewrite an
ordinary English word into a name by mistake. Say a contact's name and
it lands right.

Long unbroken thoughts become sentences

Talk for a long stretch without pausing and Chalant now gives you the
full stops you meant, even when you never breathe long enough for a
comma. It stays careful: sentences built on "if" or "while" are left
whole, and it never splits a phrase in the wrong place.

It listens from the edge of the screen

The little strip that used to pop up while you talk is gone. In its
place, a soft light gathers along the very top edge of the screen,
brightening with your voice and fading when you stop. Nothing floats,
nothing covers your work.

1.38.0

Chalant 1.38.0

Long thoughts get their full stops, even when you never pause.

The run-on fix now works on speech that never stops

Talk for a long stretch without pausing and the transcriber writes one
enormous sentence with no commas in it at all. Until now Chalant needed
those commas to know where a thought ended, so the fastest, most
unbroken speech, the kind that most needs the help, got none of it.

Now a long sentence ends wherever a new thought starts, comma or no
comma. It stays careful: sentences built on "if" or "while" are never
cut apart, a coordinator joining two adjectives is never a sentence end,
and "and then letting it go" is left alone while "and then it started"
is not.

1.37.0

Chalant 1.37.0

When dictation does nothing, it now tells you why.

The silences are gone

Hold the key and nothing happens: until now that could mean your
microphone was denied, or macOS was still downloading the words for your
language, or a permission had been switched off, and Chalant kept every
one of those reasons to itself. Now it says which, out loud, the moment
it happens.

And a screen that always has the answer

Settings, Dictation now lists the four things dictation needs, live:
your microphone, noticing the Option key, typing into your apps, and the
words for your language. Anything missing says so and offers the door
straight to the right place in System Settings. This matters most for
the one failure that can never announce itself: when macOS is not
letting Chalant notice the key, the key press never arrives at all, so
this screen is the only place the truth can live.

1.36.0

Chalant 1.36.0

Your contacts stop eating ordinary words.

If the engine wrote a real word, Chalant believes it

A name from your contacts could still slip into a sentence when the
microphone was unsure and the word sounded close: "can you read this
chart" came back "can you read this Sharat". Chalant used to guard
against that with a list of everyday words, and a list can never hold
all of English.

Now it asks macOS. Any word your Mac's own dictionary recognises is
left exactly as it was heard, however close a contact's name sounds.
Unusual names are still repaired the way they always were, because
those are not words in anybody's dictionary.

1.35.0

Chalant 1.35.0

A first run that proves itself.

Dictation comes second, and it works before it asks for anything

New installs used to meet the wordmark and the island's verbs before
they ever reached dictation, and the tour never actually had anyone
dictate. The first real attempt happened later, alone, often with
nothing on screen to receive the words.

Now dictation is the second card, and it holds the landing spot itself.
Turn it on, hold the key or the card's own button, say a sentence, and
your words appear right there in the card. Only the microphone is
needed for that. Letting Chalant type into your other apps is asked on
the next card, after you have already watched it work.

The card's button matters on a Mac where the key permission was
refused: it drives dictation directly, so a first run can no longer sit
there doing nothing without saying why.

1.34.0

Chalant 1.34.0

The second ear starts teaching.

A word misheard twice is fixed from then on

Chalant listens a second time after your words land, with a slower,
more careful ear, and until now it could only use what it heard where
replacing text is safe. In your editor it never was, so the better
hearing was thrown away.

Now nothing is wasted. When the second ear hears a word differently
from what landed, Chalant remembers the pair. Hear the same pair
twice and the fix moves to the front of the line: from then on the
word lands right the first time, in every app, with nothing changing
on your screen after the fact.

It stays careful about it. Only words the microphone itself was unsure
of can be replaced, everyday English is never rewritten, and a pair
you delete stays deleted.

1.33.0

Chalant 1.33.0

The update row answers when you look.

Settings now checks when you do

Chalant checks for new versions once a day, but a release published
after that daily look stayed invisible until the next one. Now opening
the General page is itself the ask: Chalant quietly checks right then,
and a small line always tells the truth, which version you run and
when it last looked. When something new exists, the install button is
there as before. Nothing installs without you asking, same as always.