What's new

- New "Combine my accounts" toggle in the admin Settings tab. Folds the two owner accounts (the operator's personal + work Google identities) into one merged row at the top of the Users tab — usage count, cost, dictations, words all summed, and "last active" set to whichever was used most recently. Has no effect when "Exclude me" is also on (both rows would be filtered out anyway). Saved per browser, only changes what the operator sees — every other admin still sees both accounts separately.

- Usage tab now shows a "Downloaders" KPI. Counts unique users (not raw clicks) who clicked a download button in the period, with the same vs-prior delta the other KPIs show. The previous funnel counts were already unique on the Overview tab — Usage just didn't surface downloads at all, so a "5 clicks vs 5 users vs 4 actually-installed" question had to be answered with a manual SQL query.

- Activity tab in the user-detail dossier: "Details" column is now readable. When a row actually has details (e.g. an error reason like reason=no_input_device, selected=default), the text now renders in the foreground colour instead of the same low-contrast grey we use for empty cells.

- If you sign in on macOS, iOS, Android, or Linux, the dashboard now offers a one-click "Notify me when {your platform} ships" button instead of asking you to compose a support email. Re-visit the dashboard later and it'll show "You're on the {platform} waitlist" so you don't double-enrol or wonder if it took. Email is the one already on file (no re-typing), and we'll send a single message when there's a build for you to install — no marketing pings in between.

- New "Usage" tab in the admin dashboard. Sits between Overview and Users. Answers one specific question fast — "are people actually dictating, or just installing?" Shows headline KPIs (active installs, dictators, transcriptions, words), a separate trend chart for each metric, and a top-dictators table with first/last-activity timestamps and active-days count.

- Vs-prior-period comparison on every KPI. Each card now shows an arrow + percentage delta against the same-length window immediately before — e.g. when looking at "last 30 days" you also see how that compares to days 31–60. Green for up, red for down. New "NEW" tag when the prior period had zero activity.

- Pickable period. Dropdown for 7 / 14 / 30 / 60 / 90 days, sticky to your browser so you don't have to re-pick every visit.

- "Exclude me from metrics" toggle moved to Settings. Was a checkbox on the Users tab; now lives in Settings (admin) so the choice applies globally across the Users and Usage tabs at once. Sticky per-browser. Hides owner/dogfooding traffic so the headline numbers reflect real-user signal.

- The admin user-detail view now shows system info for "single-session" users. When someone installed HyperVoice but never relaunched the app, their system_capabilities event (CPU, RAM, mics, default mic) was getting orphaned — captured fine, but invisible in the admin UI because the lookup query only joined via license_key or post-claim user_token, and that event fires before the user signs in. Now the lookup also tries the machine_id path through claim_tokens, which catches the pre-link rows once the user has linked at least once on that machine. Same fix applied to the all-events query so the Events tab picks up early-launch rows too.

- Funnel honesty fix. The "Dictating" stage on the admin Users + Leads tabs used to count any pipeline completion — including 0-word ones. So a user who held the hotkey three times and got nothing each time looked just as activated as someone successfully producing transcripts. The aggregate now requires at least one real word transcribed before flipping to "Dictating," so users with silence-pattern dictations correctly show as mic_tested / model_downloaded instead of dictated.

- **The mic test now tells you why it didn't work, not just that it didn't work.** Previously when the test came back empty, you got a generic "we didn't pick anything up — try again" message that left you guessing what to do. Now we look at what we actually captured and show one of three targeted hints:

- No audio at all → "Your mic might be muted, or another app could be using it (Teams, Zoom, Discord, OBS). Try a different microphone above…"

- Audio but very quiet → "We captured a few seconds of audio, but barely any sound. Likely the mute button on your headset is on, or a different mic is selected as default…"

- Audio but no recognisable words → "The volume looked fine, but no recognisable speech came through. Try speaking a bit louder and more clearly…"

- Sound settings open in one click. When the test comes back empty, a new "Open Sound settings" button takes you straight to Windows' sound input settings — no more digging through Settings menus to figure out which mic is set as default.

- The microphone picker briefly highlights itself with a subtle blue pulse if the test came back empty — a visual nudge that swapping mics is the most useful next step.

- Onboarding mic test now requires a deliberate "Skip test" if you don't run it. Previously the same shiny brand-coloured "Next" button sat there at every step, so it was easy to breeze past the mic test without ever pressing record — and then discover the mic wasn't working three days later when your first dictation came up empty. Now the Next button on the mic-test step changes to a quieter outlined "Skip test" button until you've actually completed a test (success or failure). You can still skip — but you have to mean it. Helps catch wrong-default-mic problems during setup, where they're cheapest to fix.

- You can now find larger speech models more easily. The status-bar model dropdown's "More models..." link is now "Download a more accurate model" with a one-line note underneath: Larger models are more accurate but slower. Same place — bottom of the dropdown when you click the model name in the status bar.

- Fixed: that link used to take you to Settings → General. It now correctly opens Settings → Processing, where the speech-model picker actually lives.

- Onboarding now ends with a hint about model upgrades. The Summary step has a small line at the bottom: "Want better accuracy later? Settings → Processing has larger speech models you can download anytime — they're more accurate but slower." So a new user who finds the default Base model's accuracy underwhelming knows there's a path to better without having to ask.

- The dashboard tab bar now has a Download button anchored to the right. Visible regardless of which tab you're on, so when you want to install HyperVoice on a second machine you can grab the installer in one click instead of having to know to dig into the Devices tab. Hover the button for the "Install on another device" tooltip.

- Why: previously, the big animated "Download for Windows" button on the Get Started tab disappeared as soon as you'd downloaded once — sensible for first-time users (don't keep nagging) but it left returning users with no obvious download path. The only existing fallback was a small inline link buried in the Devices tab. Now the option is always one click away.

- Fixed: home screen looked like it was recording right after onboarding. When you finished the onboarding microphone test and the app moved to the main view, the recording overlay would paint over the home screen as if you were currently dictating — even though you weren't, and even though the floating pill was correctly back to idle. Cause: the test recording entered the "recording" state but never had a matching "I'm done" event the main window could hear, so the global status was stuck. Now resets cleanly the moment the test transcription completes.

- Microphone test step has a live waveform now. While you're holding the recording during the onboarding mic test, a 16-bar audio-level visualizer pulses with your voice — the same one in the floating pill. Confirms the mic is hot before you commit to reading the script (and stops the "is it actually working?" doubt that came from a static red button).

- Pick your microphone right inside the test step. A small "Microphone: ▼" dropdown sits between the test sentence and the start button. Most "we didn't pick anything up" failures are wrong-default-mic problems (laptop internal vs USB headset vs conference dongle), and now you can switch without leaving onboarding to dig through Settings. Defaults to your system default mic, lists all detected input devices.

- Fixed: pill stuck on "Transcribing..." after the test. When you finished the mic test, the floating pill window stayed in the "Transcribing..." state forever instead of returning to idle — the test transcription was missing the "I'm done" signal that the pill needed. Now resets cleanly.

- Onboarding got a much friendlier first run. The old "pick a speech model" step was a question almost no one knew how to answer ("Tiny? Base? What's a Whisper Medium?"). It's gone. We now ask one question — what language do you speak — pick the right speech model for you, download it with a clean progress animation, and immediately put you through a microphone test so you know everything works before the rest of setup.

- The microphone test gives you a sentence to read in your own language, then transcribes it on the spot and shows what we heard. If we got something, you see "Looks great — your microphone is working." If we didn't pick anything up, you get a clear "We didn't pick anything up — try again." Press the big start/stop button (no hotkey needed yet), short and simple. Localized to the 10 most common HyperVoice languages.

- Multilingual support is now a first-class onboarding choice. Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi — pick one and the right model is downloaded automatically. There's also an "Other (multilingual)" option for any other language. Nothing about the rest of the app is translated yet (still English UI), but transcription now actually uses the language you chose instead of always assuming English under the hood.

- Onboarding "Next" no longer throws away an unsaved hotkey. If you click Change on the hotkey step, type a new combination, and then click Next instead of Save, the new combo is now saved automatically (rather than silently discarded as before). Captured + valid → saved + advanced. Captured + conflicting with another app → stays on the step with the inline error so you can pick another. Clicked Change but never typed anything → the "change" attempt is dismissed and you advance with whatever was already there.

- "Sign In with HyperVoice" is now "Sign in to HyperVoice" — small grammar fix on the account-link screen + matching dashboard instructions. The previous wording followed the "Sign in with Google" convention used when X is an external auth provider, which made the desktop button read like HyperVoice was logging you into something else.

- Friendly recovery flow when your keyboard shortcut is taken. If another app on your computer is already using Ctrl+Shift+Space (the default), HyperVoice now opens a focused "Pick a keyboard shortcut" sheet instead of leaving you with a tiny error toast and a non-working app. The sheet shows the failed combo as physical-looking key chips, lets you press a new combination and see live whether it's available (green tick) or also in use (red), and offers three one-click suggestions of combos that are usually free (Ctrl+Alt+Space, Ctrl+Shift+H, Alt+Shift+V). Press Enter to save, Esc to skip.

- Skip-for-now path stays beautiful too. If you'd rather decide later, a slim "No keyboard shortcut active" banner stays at the top of the app with a one-click "Choose shortcut" button — so you can come back to it whenever you want without having to dig through Settings.

- The recovery sheet now also appears during onboarding. If your default hotkey is taken on a fresh install, you'll be prompted to pick a working one as part of the first-run flow rather than after — no more "I picked Continue and now there's a surprise modal" moment.

- New "Avg time per dictation" chart on your Statistics page. Shows, day by day for the last 30 days, how long each of your dictations took to process end-to-end (Whisper transcription plus any post-processing), in milliseconds. Lower is faster.

- Toggle the split between All, GPU vs CPU, and Whisper model to see whether your speed is being driven by your hardware, the model size you've picked, or just normal day-to-day variance. Useful before deciding "is it worth downloading the larger model?" or "is the GPU path actually helping me?"

- Section 2.4 of the Privacy Policy has been rewritten to spell out exactly what we capture. Where it previously said something vague like "we may collect anonymized aggregated usage data," it now lists the actual categories — machine metadata (CPU, RAM, mics, OS), reliability events (crashes, hotkey/audio failures, pipeline errors), feature usage (provider/mode + a couple of UI events), website errors, and a single platform bucket inferred from your browser.

- A new "What we never collect" paragraph spells out the inverse: the content of what you dictate or transcribe, any character/word count or hash derived from that text, form inputs, cookies, localStorage, keystrokes outside the recording hotkey, files on your machine, browsing data.

- Nothing about what we actually capture has changed — every concrete capture was already documented entry-by-entry in the Data & Privacy Update Log at the bottom of the policy. This rewrite just brings the prose at the top of the page in line with the log, so the policy itself reads accurately without you needing to scroll to section 10.

- Your Statistics cards now show trends at a glance. The Transcriptions, Total Words, and Speaking Time cards have a small 14-day sparkline along the bottom, so you can see how you've been trending without scrolling down to the full chart. An upward curve usually means a good week.

- Avg Speed now shows how this week compares to last. Because average speaking speed is a ratio, a tiny sparkline would swing wildly on a quiet day. Instead the card shows something like ↑ 12% vs previous 7d — green arrow up if you're getting faster, red arrow down if slower, "flat" if you're within a couple of percent. Hover for the exact numbers. It stays hidden if either week didn't have enough dictation for a fair comparison.

- Account linking no longer asks for a 6-character setup code. Click "Sign In with HyperVoice", sign in in your browser, and the app links automatically — that's the whole flow. You'll no longer see a code-entry box in the app, and the dashboard no longer has a "Browser flow didn't work? Use a setup code instead" panel to hunt for.

- Why the change: the code was a fallback for the rare case where your browser couldn't hand the sign-in back to the desktop app, but its presence in the UI made the main sign-in look less trustworthy than it is. The app now does that fallback work invisibly — if the direct hand-off doesn't complete within a couple of seconds, the app finishes the link itself by checking with our server in the background. You never see anything fail, and you never type a code.

- If the browser doesn't open at all, the "copy this URL into any browser" fallback still works — paste it anywhere and signing in on that browser will still link the app automatically.

- Auto-update no longer interrupts a model download. If HyperVoice was downloading a speech model in the background and a new version finished installing at the same time, the app used to immediately restart to apply the update — killing your download halfway and wasting the bandwidth. Now the update waits politely for the model download to finish before restarting. You'll see a small "Update ready — restarting after {model} finishes downloading…" banner so you know what's going on.

- Better diagnostics for setup problems. When you launch HyperVoice we now check whether your machine actually has what's needed (CPU, RAM, microphone) and report the result back so we can spot when someone's hardware can't run the app well. We also detect when key things go wrong silently — like your hotkey already being claimed by another app, or there being no microphone available — instead of just leaving you wondering why nothing's happening.

- This is purely about us being able to diagnose and fix issues faster. See /privacy → Data & Privacy Update Log for exactly what's captured (machine metadata only — never what you say or type).

- Every change that affects what we store or transmit is now listed in one place. New "Data & Privacy Update Log" section on /privacy, reverse-chronological, with "What's captured" and "What's NOT captured" spelled out for every entry. A prominent "What's changed recently" chip near the top of the policy page takes you straight there.

- Going forward, we stop adding "Privacy note" boilerplate to every changelog entry — dilution makes those notes easier to skim past. The dedicated log is the authoritative, readable-in-one-sitting source. Purely cosmetic / UI changes are kept out on purpose — only data-handling changes go there.

- Per-dictation WPM on the History tab. Every row now shows how fast you spoke for that specific dictation — green + bold when you beat your own 7-day average, neutral otherwise. Hover for the exact number and what you're being compared against. Combined with yesterday's voiced-time fix, these numbers are accurate even on long-hold dictations where you paused partway.

- Avg Speed (WPM) is now accurate again. Previously, if you accidentally held the hotkey long after you stopped speaking, those seconds of silence got counted as speaking time and dragged your average speed down. We now use Whisper's own segment timestamps to measure voiced time only — so a 4-second hotkey press with 2.5s of speech counts as 2.5s, not 4s. Plus we filter out obvious stuck-hotkey outliers (over 15 seconds of audio with fewer than 30 WPM worth of words — almost always accidental). Your existing history is included in the filter immediately; new dictations from this version onward also benefit from the more accurate voiced-time measurement.

- Sign-in now recovers when your browser doesn't open. If you clicked "Sign In with HyperVoice" on the account link screen and Windows silently cancelled opening your browser (a UAC prompt you dismissed, no default browser set, or antivirus blocking), the app used to show a cryptic error and leave you stuck. Now it shows the exact sign-in URL with a Copy button — paste it into any browser manually and the flow completes the same way.

- Non-Windows visitors get a heads-up on the Dashboard. If you signed up from a Mac, iPhone, Android, or Linux machine, the dashboard now tells you clearly that HyperVoice is Windows-only right now (macOS on the roadmap) with a waitlist email link — instead of silently letting you download an installer that won't run on your OS.

- Better diagnostics when something fails. If your dictation hits a processing error, we now capture the upstream request ID from the provider (OpenAI / Anthropic / our Cloud) alongside the error message. Makes it much faster for us to trace a specific failure end-to-end and — if needed — raise a support ticket with the provider. Zero user-visible change.

- HyperVoice Cloud post-processing now works if you signed in via the new account flow. If you were getting "Cloud error: Not authenticated" when using Clean Up, Summarize, Professional Email, etc., this release fixes it. The cause was a gap in the auth wiring for users who signed in via their HyperVoice account (rather than pasting a license key) — the Cloud call wasn't sending your session. Fixed on both the desktop and the server. Your dictation falls back to raw text on older versions, so nothing was lost — but you'll now get the actual processed output.

- More complete error reporting for us. Extending yesterday's change so all pipeline failures — Whisper errors, audio issues, paste problems, anything that previously just aborted silently — now get reported back to us. Nothing changes for you; this is about making sure if something breaks for a user, we can actually see it and fix it.

- "What's new" signals added to the website. A small pill on the landing page shows when HyperVoice was last updated. Logged in? Your dashboard now has a small "What's new" link above the tabs with a pulsing dot when there's a release you haven't seen yet — mirrors the bell panel in the desktop app.

- Post-processing failures are now reported back to us. Previously if a processing mode errored (e.g. a BYOK API key was missing, a provider was unreachable, or the LLM returned an error), the app silently fell back to the raw transcription and swallowed the error — making it impossible for us to spot what went wrong for users. Now processing failures are logged centrally so we can see them, debug them, and fix them without waiting for users to report. Your dictation still falls back to raw text, so nothing you do changes — the change is purely for visibility on our end.

- Settings → About → Updates now has a single always-visible "Check for Updates" button. Previously the button disappeared once you'd checked and was replaced by a smaller "Check again" link in the up-to-date state. Now the button stays put on the left in every state, and the status — "You're on the latest version," "Checking…," "v0.5.94 is available," an error, etc. — sits to its right. Re-checking is always a single click from where your eye last saw the button.

- Dictionary replacements no longer leave a trailing period on slash-command-style rules. If you've set up a replacement like clear command → /clear and you speak the phrase on its own, Whisper adds a period to the end of the transcript ("Clear command.") before the replacement runs. The old behavior left you with /clear. in the paste. Now, when your entire spoken phrase is the single replacement trigger, HyperVoice returns just the replacement value — no stray punctuation. Multi-sentence dictations ("Clear command. Then save.") still keep their punctuation unchanged.

- Discord card above the tabs. Whichever dashboard tab you're on (Get Started, Subscription, Devices, Feedback, Account), a "Need help or have a question?" Discord card sits in the persistent area at the top. Sits directly below the download banner when that's showing, so first-time users hitting install friction see the community support path immediately.

- Fixed a stale "You haven't downloaded HyperVoice yet" banner. It used to linger for users who had downloaded and were actively dictating, if they'd cleared cookies, signed in fresh on a new device, or installed via a different browser. Now the banner respects the server-side record of your install + usage, so if the server knows you're installed the banner hides. Also writes the signal back to your local browser so the banner doesn't flash on your next visit either.

- "You're all set up" card on Get Started is now dismissible. Once you've seen the green confirmation, click the × in the top-right to hide it across sessions. Your stats below stay visible as normal. If you ever want it back, clear the hv_all_set_dismissed localStorage key.

- The Get Started tab still has its own bigger Discord card inside the checklist, for prominence at the moment of setup.

- There's a Discord now. A place to ask questions, report bugs, and share what you're building with voice input. Usually faster than email — the team and other users are there live.

- Top nav: "Community" link in the main menu (next to Features, Pricing, Blog) and a Discord icon chip next to the theme toggle, on every page.

- On the web: every footer has a Discord link. The dashboard's "Get Started" checklist has a prominent "Stuck? Ask in Discord" card that points at #install-help for install-related questions.

- In the desktop app: Settings → About has a "Join the Discord" card. The Feedback tab suggests Discord for anything that benefits from a back-and-forth. "What's New" ends with a "Discuss this release" link.

- Invite (unlimited, never expires): discord.gg/EM5sFnCUCX.

- New "What's New" in the sidebar. A bell icon between Feedback and Settings opens this panel. You'll see a small dot on it whenever there's something new; clicking the panel clears it.

- Remotely unlinking a device now works properly. If you unlink this machine from your web dashboard, HyperVoice here drops back to the Account Link screen on its next check (up to an hour, or immediately on restart). Before this you could end up in a broken in-between state.

- Expired or renewed subscriptions now sync automatically. The app re-checks your plan from the server every hour, so you don't need to restart after a renewal, upgrade, or cancellation.

- Clearer banner when a Pro subscription lapses. If your Pro plan ends and you drop to the free tier, you'll see a distinct amber banner with a "Reactivate" link — separate from the regular free-tier banner.

- Cancelled or failed-payment subscriptions keep Pro access through the period you paid for. You won't get cut off mid-month for a failed renewal while the payment is being retried.

- Fixed a flickering/reload loop on the Subscription page for users on the newer account-linked flow.

- Subscription page shows your plan details correctly for account-linked users — plan, status, renewal date, all populated from the server, with a Refresh button.

- You no longer deal with license keys. Your plan syncs automatically from your HyperVoice web account — sign in once and everything just works. Existing users with a license key keep working until they link their account; after linking, the old key is retired.

- Offline grace period — if you're away from the internet, HyperVoice keeps working for 14 days on whatever your last known plan was, rather than locking you out.

- Safer settings saves. If HyperVoice or your machine crashed while saving settings, the file could sometimes become corrupted and prevent startup. That can't happen any more.

- More reliable stop → start in quick succession. Pressing your hotkey rapidly no longer risks the old recording bleeding into the new one.

- Pasting to the right app, every time. If the window you originally recorded into has been closed and its window handle recycled to another app, HyperVoice now detects that and skips the paste rather than pasting into the wrong place.

- Faster paste on snappy systems, more reliable on busy ones. Replaced a fixed wait with an active poll so paste happens as soon as the target window is ready.

- GPU stays enabled after harmless errors. Previously a single failed model load could disable GPU permanently across restarts. Only an actual crash in the GPU code now disables it (the original intent).

- Account Link screen recovery paths — 3-minute timeout, "still waiting?" helper after 15 seconds, one-click retry / manual-code / open-dashboard buttons when something goes wrong. Friendlier messages for expired or wrong setup codes.

- Onboarding tells you what the app does and how long setup takes before asking you to do anything. Model downloads now show bytes-so-far and a rolling ETA.

- Faster provider key lookups — checks an in-memory cache before hitting the OS keyring. You'll notice this whenever HyperVoice starts a dictation.

- Your stats, now with charts. Get Started's "You're all set up" screen now shows total dictations, words transcribed, estimated time saved, daily-activity chart, day-of-week breakdown, current streak, and average latency.

- New Devices tab. See every linked device (name, last-active, app version, first-linked date) and unlink any of them remotely. Device limit is shown up-front.

- Better Subscription tab. Renamed from "Plan", handles every subscription state — active / trial / cancelled-with-access / past-due / lapsed — with clear next-step CTAs.

- Get Started checklist. 4-step live progress bar (create account → download → link → dictate) that updates as you go, with a celebratory "You're all set up" screen when done.

- Display name pulled from Google sign-in. Previously every Google signup showed blank name in the dashboard; now your name is picked up automatically.

- Timestamps show your local time. "Last active 2h ago" is now accurate regardless of your timezone.

- New walkthrough at hypervoice.app/install-help explaining Windows' "protected your PC" warning with step-by-step screenshots and a plain-English "why this happens" explainer.

- Linked from the dashboard at the moment you click Download, so the help is there if you need it.

- HyperVoice is now free — 500 words/day, forever, no credit card. Pricing, homepage, and FAQ reflect it.

- Clearer Pro vs Lifetime framing. Pricing section explains the upgrade trigger ("when 500 words/day isn't enough, or when raw dictation needs polish before it ships") rather than just listing features.

- Polished copy throughout — CTAs say what they actually do (no more "Sign Up to Download" chained verbs), warnings on the homepage explain themselves, pricing subtitles reflect real benefits.

- Hero loads faster. The big headline on the homepage now paints instantly instead of fading in after 700ms.

- Respects "reduce motion" system setting. If you've turned off animations at the OS level, HyperVoice's website honours it everywhere.

- Friendly auth errors. Sign-in / sign-up errors now read like English ("That email address doesn't look right. Check for typos.") instead of Firebase jargon.

- Forgot password link on the sign-in form with a one-click password-reset email.

- Password strength meter on sign-up so you can see if your password is weak before submitting.

## Older releases

This public changelog started with v0.5.87. For questions about earlier builds, email support@hypervoice.app or ask in #install-help on Discord.