utt 2.0.0
Hold a key, speak, release. The text lands at your cursor. Nothing leaves the
machine.
Plugins are now extensions, and one of them can no longer start working just by
appearing on disk. Alongside that: utt can tidy a transcript with Apple's
on-device model, and everything that receives a transcript now also receives
what was actually heard.
Plugins are extensions
The word changed everywhere — the settings page, the manifest directory, the
documentation. "Plugin" suggested something bolted on; these are programs that
speak to utt, and several of them are the whole reason a transcript leaves the
app at all.
This is the breaking part of 2.0, and it falls on the programs, not on you.
utt moves your existing plugins/ folder to extensions/ once, on first
launch, so everything installed carries across with its settings and its state
intact. What does not move is the program on the other side: a companion that
writes into plugins/ is now writing into a folder utt no longer reads, and
needs its author's updated build. The deep link changed with it —
utt://show?section=plugin:<id> is now section=extension:<id>.
Nothing about the file formats changed, only where they live.
An extension asks before it can do anything
Installing an extension has always been dropping a file in a folder — no
installer, no registry, nothing signed. That is worth keeping, and it is why
utt now asks.
What it could not stay is silent. A manifest that appeared could ask for your
audio, every transcript you dictate and the API token, and until now it got all
three the moment it landed. A manifest that appears now lands pending: inert,
with no clips transcribed, no transcripts delivered and no token written, until
you say yes on its page. The page tells you what it asked for in plain words
before you decide.
Everything you already had keeps working, and you will not be asked about it.
Extensions present when you upgrade are carried over as approved — or as
switched off, if that is what you had already chosen.
An extension that sends a clip before you have ruled on it gets an answer saying
so, rather than watching a file that never appears.
You decide whose clips go first
Several extensions can want a transcription at the same time, and until now the
oldest clip simply won. Each extension that sends audio now has a place in the
queue you choose: First, In turn, or Last. Its own clips still come
back in the order it sent them.
It decides who goes next, never who gets interrupted — whatever is being
transcribed finishes either way.
utt can tidy what you said
Switch on Text → Cleanup and utt runs the transcript through Apple's
on-device language model before it lands: the "um", the false start, the
sentence you corrected halfway through, and the punctuation a recogniser does
not add. It is off by default, and it stays off until you turn it on.
The model is never trusted. Everything it is allowed to do is a deletion or a
punctuation change, and utt checks that its answer really is your words with
some taken out — not a summary, not a rewrite, not an answer to a question it
thought you asked. Anything else and the raw transcript is pasted instead,
whole. It costs about a second a paragraph, which is why it is a choice rather
than the default.
docs/transcript-cleanup.md has the full account, including what it will not do
and why the numbers are what they are.
What was heard, beside what was typed
Once something rewrites your words, "the transcript" stops being one thing. So
every place a transcript goes now carries both: what the recogniser heard, what
finally landed, and which stages changed it — your replacement rules, the
cleanup stage, formatting, a filtering extension, or an API caller's own hints.
That is in the panel after you dictate, in the history, in an extension's file
and in the API response. A stage that ran and left your words alone is now
distinguishable from a stage that never ran, which it was not before.
Each of those stages also reports what it cost, in milliseconds, so a dictation
that felt slow can be attributed rather than guessed at.
The Text settings are the pipeline, in order
The old Output section had grown into a drawer. Text now has its own group in
the rail — Replacements, Cleanup, Formatting — listed in the order
they actually run, and Output keeps delivery and saving. Old links to the
retired pages still land somewhere sensible.
Fixes
Your clipboard comes back whatever was on it. The restore only ever put back
plain text, so a clipboard holding an image, a file or styled text got nothing
back and kept the transcript instead.
utt's own files are created private, 0600 and 0700, rather than inheriting
whatever the umask happened to be. Your history and your API token live in them.
The menu bar no longer shifts while its menu is open, and a rail taller than the
window scrolls instead of uncovering it.
Updating
Everything you have set up carries over. Your extensions move folders by
themselves and keep working without being approved again.
The one thing to watch is an extension whose own program has not been updated
for 2.0: utt will show it, because its manifest moved, but the program will be
writing its clips and its status into the old folder and nothing will happen.
That needs a new build from whoever wrote it.