utt 1.0.0

Hold a key, speak, release. The text lands at your cursor. Nothing leaves the
machine.

That sentence has been true since the first build, and it is the reason this one
is 1.0.0 rather than 0.6. Everything the app set out to do, it now does: it
hears you, it types for you, it stays out of the way, and the audio never goes
anywhere. What is left is no longer "the missing part" — it is other things,
which is what a first version is supposed to feel like.

Other apps and devices can send audio to it

There is an API now. Switch it on under Connect → API and something else —
a phone, a script, another Mac — can send a clip and get the text back. The
transcription still happens here, on this machine, with the model you chose.

You decide how far it reaches: this Mac only, your local network, or anywhere.
"This Mac only" means the port does not appear on any network interface at all,
not merely that requests are turned away. Local network means a network this Mac
is actually on, which is not the same as an address that merely looks private —
a VPN is private and elsewhere, and a phone on your own Wi-Fi very often has a
public address.

Every request needs the token utt gives you. There is a reference you can open
in a browser, and a button that copies a brief for a language model, if you are
having one write the client.

Programs can put their own settings in this window

A plugin is another program you install yourself that wants a page in utt's
window instead of a settings screen of its own. It says what it is in a file;
utt draws the page, saves what you choose where the program can read it, and
tells it what it asked for.

Each plugin's page lists exactly what it is being given — whether it receives
your transcripts, whether it holds your API token — so it is visible rather than
something you would have to go looking for. If a plugin runs a background
daemon, utt shows what the system says about it: running, stopped, or never
installed. A crashed daemon can no longer claim to be fine.

Plugins can also hand utt audio directly, without the API being switched on at
all. Nothing goes over the network for that; it is one program passing a file to
another on the same machine. While utt is transcribing a plugin's clip, the menu
bar mark runs in that plugin's own colour, so work arriving from your phone
never looks like something being said at your desk.

Connect → Plugins explains all of it, and has a guide you can paste into a
language model if you want to write one.

It tells your microphones apart

Every input now says what it is: built-in, headphone jack, USB, Bluetooth,
Continuity, or a virtual device like BlackHole. A list of names told you nothing
about which one was the phone on your desk, and the phone is the one that stops
working.

Continuity says which kind, too — USB or Wi-Fi — because they are not
the same situation, and "plug it in" is only useful advice if you know which one
you are looking at. utt remembers, so a microphone you have unplugged still says
what it connected through.

A Continuity microphone can go quiet while still looking perfectly present: the
phone is listed, still selected, sending nothing. Each one now has its own
reconnect button, next to the device it actually reopens.

Words it was never going to get right

An app sending a clip usually knows the words that are coming — the name of the
project, the tool being talked about, its own name. utt did not, so those were
exactly the ones that came back wrong: "cogwheel" as "cockwheel", "TUI" as
"Tu Y".

A caller can now send that vocabulary along with the clip, and utt corrects near
misses against it. It is deliberately careful: a word is only replaced when it
was already nearly right, because a wrong correction reads perfectly well and
says something else. It will not rescue an ordinary word misheard as another
ordinary word — "three" heard as "tree" is not something a word list can reach.

This applies to clips sent by other apps. Dictation at your own keyboard is
unchanged.

A window you can find things in

The settings were four tabs that had become bins; "General" held permissions,
the model, sounds and the Dock icon, and the only way to find anything was to
read every card. There is now a rail down the side and one page per thing, each
with a line at the top saying what is on it.

The transcript list lives in the same rail, so you move between what you said
and how utt behaves the same way you move between any two pages. The old
cogwheel is gone — the window is either open or it is the pill.

Updating

If you are on 0.5.x, utt will offer this to you. Nothing you have set up needs
redoing: your hotkey, your microphones, your text rules and your history all
carry over.