Three changes close the gap. Halopen now checks your sign-in is fresh BEFORE it starts recording — if it’s not, you see a "Refreshing sign-in" message instead of speaking into a void. When the sign-in does lapse during a take, the audio is preserved to the menu’s "Retry failed audio" row so you can replay it after signing back in (it used to be discarded). And the recurring license check now also refreshes your sign-in, so a Mac waking from sleep is much less likely to land in the stale state in the first place.

And when the network does still fail, your audio is saved. A new “Retry failed audio” row in the menu offers “Retry transcribe & copy” on every preserved take — one click re-runs the transcribe and drops the result on your clipboard. Audio is kept for 7 days or 20 takes, whichever comes first, and copies rather than typing because the original window’s focus is long gone.

The menu stops lying about update checks. A benign “you’re up to date” signal from the auto-updater used to read as a failure, so every successful daily check left the menu reading “couldn’t check for updates” for 24 hours. Fixed at the source.

Fewer false-positive fallbacks behind the scenes. The safety guard that protects you from a runaway cleanup was firing on legitimate Polish edits — the kind that drop “actually,” “literally,” “really,” and the other words Polish is built to clean. The guard’s stopword list now recognizes those as filler, so Polish and Editorial apply to your text more often instead of silently dropping back.

The Audit Log now keeps the text of your dictations so you can copy them back if something goes wrong. Open the log from the menu, click a row, copy the raw transcript or the cleaned version. Stays on this Mac, follows your existing retention setting.

On-your-Mac transcriptions appear in the audit log too, marked “(local)” so you can confirm at a glance that nothing left the device.

Backing out of Google or Apple sign-in no longer freezes the sign-in screen. If a web sign-in doesn’t complete, the buttons re-enable on their own so you can just try again.

A dictation that can’t land is no longer silently lost. If Halopen transcribes your speech but can’t deliver it — focus moved between when you spoke and when the text was ready, or the app refused the text — the transcript is held instead of discarded. A “Recover lost dictation” item appears in the Halopen menu: insert it at your cursor, copy it, or discard it. You choose how long to keep recovered dictations in Settings → Privacy, from “last one only” up to 24 hours. Stored only on your Mac.

The Audit Log now records how long each dictation actually was. Every transcription row shows audio length alongside the timestamp and result — a small honesty fix to a surface built for you to verify what Halopen does.

The behavior itself is unchanged from 1.8.2: code editors, terminals, and chat apps still seed to Verbatim because Editorial doesn’t fit code or chat, and On-your-Mac transcription still forces Verbatim because cleanup needs a cloud round-trip. 1.8.3 just makes the routing visible at every glance.

The four toggles you flip session-to-session — personal-dictionary biasing, clipboard + selected-text biasing, review-before-inject, and live preview — now live in the menu as native checkmark rows. Each honors its existing dependency (review is disabled when Cleanup is Verbatim; live preview is disabled in On-your-Mac mode).

A new deep link too: Open snippets… ⌃⌘S, parity with the existing vocabulary shortcut so the two user-authored stores are one keystroke apart. Settings still holds the full surface area; the menu bar is the fast lane.

A preparation step ships in the Mac client for a follow-up server-side tightening on the transcription endpoint — closing the remaining path where the public anon key alone could ride a transcription call. No flow change today; today’s binary just sends the credential the future server will require.

Per-app cleanup modes — Mail might run Polish while Cursor and Xcode stay Verbatim. Code editors, terminals, and chat apps are pre-seeded to Verbatim so dictating code or Slack messages always lands exactly as you said it.

A “review before inject” modal, off by default. Turn it on and every Polish or Editorial cleanup opens a side-by-side modal with edits highlighted — Accept, Edit, or Reject. The safety net for the brand promise.

On-your-Mac mode forces Verbatim by design. Sending the cleaned text to the cloud after promising to keep the audio on-device would honor the letter of the privacy choice but break the spirit. One privacy posture, one decision. A catastrophic-change detector also guards against the rare cleanup that drifts from polish to rewrite — when it fires, your verbatim text lands instead.

Insights — how much voice typing actually does for you. A new tab in Settings reads from data Halopen already records and surfaces a five-card dashboard: hours saved this month and all-time (against a named 50 wpm baseline), word count, session count, current dictation streak, and your top five dictionary terms. No remote analytics; everything runs against your local audit log.

Order is preserved across simultaneous takes. If you press, release, press again, and the second transcribe happens to return before the first, Halopen parks the second injection until the first lands.

The Audit Log’s “in-flight” signal is now honest. It used to read yes 96.7% of the time, while only about 1.7% of presses actually caught a take mid-flight — a bookkeeping bug. The signal now reflects reality, so the log line earns its place as a debugging surface again.

The app you’re dictating into shapes the register. Mail expects prose; Terminal, iTerm2, and Warp expect shell commands and file paths; VS Code and Cursor expect code identifiers; Slack expects a brief chat message in casual register. The anchor apps each carry a curated label and a matching hint.

Passwords and credentials in your cursor’s neighborhood never get sent. The same secret filter that has always guarded clipboard content now runs on cursor-adjacent text too — Stripe, GitHub, Slack, JWT, PEM, and AWS credential shapes, plus keywords like password=, api_key, token=. The filter errs toward rejecting.

Cursor-adjacent reads are gated on the same Accessibility permission Halopen already uses for text injection — no new permission ask — and only run when context biasing is on in Settings → Privacy.

The Audit Log gained Export… and a click-row detail sheet. Save the current filtered list as JSON, or click any row to see the full endpoint URL, status code, duration, audio seconds, and outcome — with a Copy as cURL action that assembles a reproducible request template (your anon key is never serialized).

The Vocabulary tab shows your dictionary’s prompt contribution: Dictionary tokens: ~X of 244 tells you how close your saved terms come to the transcription engine’s 244-token prompt ceiling.

New telemetry lands in the local audit log for the rare tail-end-sentence-drop case, so the next release has the data to fix it at root.

Version and update status are now visible in the menu-bar dropdown. A new line under the model identifier reads 1.5.2 · up to date, and shifts in real time to checking for updates…, downloading 1.5.3…, then 1.5.3 ready · restart Halopen — that last state is clickable for a one-tap install.

Updates now install themselves. Halopen polls in the background every 24 hours (it already did), and from this version forward it also downloads the new build silently and stages it for install on your next clean quit. No dialogs, no prompts.

Settings → Model is the page where you build conviction about what’s actually running on your Mac. It names Whisper Large v3 explicitly, attributes it to OpenAI, credits WhisperKit for the integration, and shows the three-stage compute breakdown — encoder and decoder on the Apple Neural Engine, mel-spectrogram on CPU and GPU.

Cloud dictation got faster for Pro users. Halopen used to make three network calls per dictation; the pre-flight gate and the usage tick weren’t doing anything for paid accounts. They’re gone. One call per dictation. The audit log gets quieter and your dictations land a beat sooner.

The audit log gained the status-dot treatment — green for success, yellow for rate-limited, red for server errors, orange for network failures. Smaller refinements throughout: Account tab shows your email, plan, and renewal date inline; Vocabulary opens with an explanation of what the terms actually do; the paywall footer correctly names the Stripe billing portal.

On-device transcription runs Whisper Large v3 via WhisperKit on Apple’s Neural Engine. Apple Silicon only (M1, M2, M3, M4). Opt-in from Settings → Transcription → On your Mac. Cloud mode is still the default and still recommended for everyday dictation — it uses gpt-4o-transcribe for the highest accuracy on proper nouns, multilingual code-switching, and unusual acoustic conditions. You choose per-dictation.

The audit log records every cloud call Halopen makes — endpoint, status, duration, audio seconds. Metadata only; no audio, no transcripts. In On-your-Mac mode, the log stays silent during transcription.

Personal Vocabulary lands too: add proper nouns, brand names, and technical terms in Settings → Vocabulary, and Halopen pre-feeds them to the cloud transcription engine so they land on the first pass. Plus a redesigned mode picker, a new Dock icon (the menu bar keeps the pen-and-halo glyph from 1.4.4), and a published transparency policy at halopen.com/transparency.

Transcription now lives inside Halopen — the cloud path moved off a shared backend onto its own dedicated infrastructure. Same model, same accuracy, same speed; reliability is now fully independent.

The arc’s aperture shifts as Halopen listens — wider at rest, tighter while recording, wider while waiting on the cloud, fully closed when text lands at your cursor.

macOS 14 Sonoma now works again: a modern AVAudio API call had been calling the macOS 15 path with no fallback.

Friendlier errors when the disk fills up, when a USB mic unplugs mid-take, and when the function key gets stuck. Halopen now tells you what to do.

Sign-in no longer leaks the previous user’s typed email after sign-out.

Free-tier word counting is fair to languages that don’t separate words with spaces (Mandarin, Japanese, Korean).

A polished DMG installer with a clear drag-to-Applications layout.

A welcome wizard that walks first-time users through every permission.

When dictation lands in a Secure-Input app, the menu shows the specific app and the fix.

A new Audit Log window in the menu shows the last 500 cloud calls — local, auditable, transparent.

Halopen now reads your Mac’s preferred language and passes it as a transcription hint.

The first /learn/ flagship goes live: voice typing for Claude Code on Mac.

Free forever — 2,000 words a month. No card to start.