Release notes
Changelog
Safer, faster, ready when you speak.
New
- Settings now shows the full state of your subscription. Trial dates, renewal dates, and scheduled cancellations stay accurate even when billing updates arrive out of order.
Improved
- Backup transcription and formatting respond within Whurd's time limit. Slow services no longer consume the entire request before a backup gets its chance.
- Every theme is easier to read. Secondary text, success messages, error messages, and accent buttons now meet stronger contrast targets across all ten palettes.
- The website loads much less media. Responsive screenshots and a smaller, on-demand demo video make the public pages quicker without reducing visual quality.
- Each desktop window gets only the access it needs. Recorder, overlay, and Settings privileges are separated, and microphone permission is limited to the local recorder.
Fixed
- A failed level meter can no longer discard a real dictation. If the visual meter is unavailable, Whurd still sends recorded audio for transcription instead of guessing that it was silent.
- Subscription updates no longer overwrite newer account state. Duplicate and out-of-order updates resolve to the latest known subscription.
- Existing Pro accounts cannot accidentally start a second subscription. Upgrade now refuses duplicate checkout and points current subscribers to Manage billing instead.
- Dialogs and account fields work better without a mouse. Labels, focus handling, keyboard controls, and screen-reader announcements have been tightened throughout Settings and the website.
Optional means optional.
Improved
- The voice-command list now says what was always true. The Formatting tab's command reference read like a requirement, as if you had to dictate "period" and "comma" the old-fashioned way. It is now titled "Optional voice commands" and leads with the actual promise: punctuation, capitalization, and cleanup happen on their own. The commands that earn their place (scratch that, reshaping into lists or emails) are front and center, and spoken punctuation is listed as honored, never needed.
Hears more, guesses less.
Improved
- Noticeably more accurate transcription. Whurd now records in longer natural phrases, waiting for a real pause instead of cutting at every brief breath, and carries what you already said into nearly every chunk it transcribes. The speech engine hears full sentences with context instead of isolated fragments, which means fewer misheard words, fewer invented words, and cleaner joins between phrases.
- Upgraded speech recognition. Transcription now runs on a higher-accuracy speech model. It picks up names, jargon, and quiet speech more reliably.
- Faster finish on long dictations. Longer phrases mean far fewer round trips per dictation, so long sessions no longer pile up behind service rate limits that could add seconds of waiting per phrase. Non-stop talking is also now split safely in the background, so a single stretch can never grow too large to process.
Capital letters, this time for certain.
Fixed
- Fresh dictations keep their capital letter everywhere. The 0.13.0 fix covered standard input boxes but not the rich message boxes many chat apps use, which could still leak nearby page text into the caret reader and lowercase your opener. Whurd now treats you as mid-sentence only when the text before your cursor is verified to belong to the box you're typing in, or provably continues your own previous dictation.
- Breath pauses no longer break your sentence in two. Pausing mid-sentence could produce "...within the next. Week or two." because each recorded chunk was transcribed separately and the fast formatting path shipped the seam as-is. When a chunk boundary looks like a false split, Pro dictations now always get the full AI pass, which merges it back into one sentence. Server-side, so it applies to every app version.
Your subscription, visible and steerable.
New
- Subscription card in Settings. Account now shows your plan, trial or renewal date, and payment status in one place, with annual or monthly checkout and one-click access to billing management.
Improved
- Dictation rides through service hiccups. Transcription now fails over to a backup path during outages, and rate or capacity limits answer with clear, retryable messages instead of generic errors.
- Honest offline errors. When Whurd can't reach the service, it says so plainly, keeps your words safe locally, and finishes the dictation automatically once you're back online.
- Legal pages finalized. The Terms now name their governing law, and the privacy policy describes our security practices more precisely.
Fixed
- Fresh dictations start with a capital letter. In some apps, the caret reader could pick up page text or placeholder copy from outside an empty message box and treat your new dictation as a mid-sentence continuation, leaving it lowercase. The reader now stays strictly inside the box you're typing in.
- Your vocabulary words no longer sneak into pauses. Transcription sometimes mistook a breath or pause for the custom-vocabulary hint it was given and spliced those words into your text verbatim. That signature is now detected and removed server-side, so it is fixed for every version of the app.
Plans behave exactly as promised.
New
- Card-backed Pro trials. Starter still works without a card, while Pro trials now collect payment details up front and begin billing after 14 days unless canceled.
Improved
- Clearer pricing and account copy. The website, terms, and Settings now say plainly when Pro needs payment details and when billing starts.
- Failed pastes are easier to recover. If focus changes or an app is blocked, click the notification to copy the dictation instead of digging through History.
Fixed
- Expired trials fall back to Free. Whurd now checks trial end dates on the server, reverts expired trials to the daily Free limit, and shows the upgrade path instead of saying the trial ends today forever.
The learning loop is connected.
New
- Training corpus export for admins. Whurd can summarize live opt-in data by default, and only writes transcript pairs when an explicit output path is supplied.
Improved
- Better labels for future review. Opt-in training rows now carry source, label quality, reviewed status, and context-used metadata for cleaner model-improvement workflows.
Fixed
- Context-aware dictations are collected again. When nearby text helps Whurd format a dictation, the opted-in training pair is now queued with a context-used flag instead of being dropped.
Cleaner words, quieter silence.
New
- Undo your last Whurd paste. Add an undo shortcut in Settings so you can remove Whurd's last insertion when you are still in the same app.
- See what you can say. The Formatting tab now shows common spoken commands for line breaks, punctuation, lists, emails, and quick corrections.
Improved
- Voice Profile shows momentum. Your dashboard now highlights weekly pace, best day, and the next badge within reach.
- Cleanup is stricter about your meaning. Whurd can smooth rough dictated phrasing, but now falls back instead of completing fragments with guessed details.
Fixed
- Silent takes stay silent. Near-silent recordings are now filtered by the actual audio level, so random words and canned sign-offs are less likely to appear when you did not speak.
- Short repeated fragments do not count against you. If a streamed segment only repeats nearby text, Whurd no longer bills those echoed words toward usage.
- Account checks fail the right way. The account endpoint now rejects unsupported methods before doing extra work, and sign-in key rotation fails closed when a token names an unknown key.
Cleaner dictation when speech gets messy.
Improved
- Rough speech cleans up better. Whurd now treats phrases like "it's like" and "kind of" as dictated scaffolding that needs cleanup, instead of pasting them as final text.
- Short dictations stay smart. Clean one-liners still paste quickly, while speechy snippets now get the full cleanup pass when they need it.
Fixed
- Formatting no longer preserves too much rough wording. Whurd now keeps your meaning, facts, names, and order while smoothing rambly dictated phrasing into clearer sentences.
Manage your plan without leaving Whurd.
Added
- Manage billing, right from Settings. Subscribers now get a Manage billing button on the License screen that opens your secure billing page in the browser: change or cancel your plan, update your payment method, and view past invoices. No more hunting for the website.
Cancel means cancel, and your clipboard stays yours.
Fixed
- Escape always cancels. Pressing Escape while a dictation is finishing no longer pastes or saves it. A cancelled dictation now leaves nothing behind.
- Your clipboard is preserved. If you copy something in the moment right after a dictation, Whurd no longer overwrites it with whatever was on the clipboard before.
- Recovered dictations stay safe. A dictation kept on your device after a connection hiccup is no longer dropped or duplicated while it finishes in the background.
Improved
- The Update button shows right away. When a new version is ready, the button now appears the moment Settings opens, even on a slow connection, instead of waiting on a fresh check.
Updates show up sooner.
Improved
- Settings checks for updates when it opens. The Update button no longer waits for the background timer if a new version is already available.
- Whurd checks for updates more often. After the first quick startup check, the app now looks again every few minutes instead of every hour.
Cleaner chip, cleaner sentences.
Improved
- The always-on overlay stays cleaner while idle. The move tab now stays tucked away until you hover, so the chip no longer keeps a faded handle on screen.
- The move grip is easier to read. The six dots now have more balanced spacing when the tab appears.
Fixed
- Sentence starts recover reliably. Whurd now repairs lowercase sentence starts across cleanup-off, fallback, and Whurd service formatting paths before text is pasted.
Safer dictation, stronger controls.
New
- Undo the last Whurd insertion. Use the new tray command or shortcut to ask the same app to undo the last paste, with a focus check so Whurd does not undo in the wrong window.
- Block paste in sensitive apps. Password managers and terminals are protected by default, and you can edit the app blocklist in Settings. Whurd still keeps the text available in History or the overlay copy button.
- Export and tidy History. History now supports export, per-item delete, and a deliberate confirmation before clearing everything.
- Follow your system theme. The new Auto theme switches between light and dark with Windows.
Improved
- Whurd checks the target app before pasting. If focus changes while a dictation is processing, Whurd skips the paste instead of putting private text into the wrong place.
- Privacy Mode is stricter. Turning it on clears saved history and pending recovery text so future dictations stay off disk.
- Settings handles trouble visibly. Load and save errors now show a clear message and retry path instead of quietly drifting from what is saved.
- The overlay and Settings are easier to use with assistive tech. Status updates, tabs, focus handling, and light-theme contrast have all been tightened.
Fixed
- Recorder crashes and mic errors recover. Whurd reloads the hidden recorder, shows the error, and salvages the active dictation when it can.
- Slow processing can be cancelled. Esc and the overlay cancel button now work while Whurd is processing, and the in-flight request is aborted.
- System audio comes back reliably. The mute-while-dictating option now reconciles fast taps, mic errors, and quit paths so audio is not left muted.
- Account, quota, and billing checks are harder to confuse. Usage limits, checkout links, and billing updates now fail closed and ignore stale or duplicate events.
Sharper formatting, fewer surprises.
Fixed
- The overlay survives sleep and monitor changes. The dictation chip reasserts itself after the system wakes, after a display is added, removed, or rescaled, and recovers if its view ever crashes, so it no longer goes missing or stops floating on top.
- Every sentence gets its capital and closing period, even on the fast path. Quicker dictations skip the AI step for speed, and that path used to capitalize only the first word and could end without a period. Now it capitalizes the start of each sentence and finishes the last one, so "...1987. you can..." comes out "...1987. You can..." with a period at the end.
- Messages that open with "I'm sorry", "I appreciate", or "I can't" now format normally. These everyday openings could skip the cleanup pass and paste as-is; they get the same polish as everything else now.
- Question marks land on the right sentence. A question in a later sentence now gets its question mark ("It's offline again. Can you figure out why?"), even when the dictation opens with a statement. A question word early in a longer dictation no longer flips a later statement into a question, and plain statements like "What a mess." stay statements.
- A standalone "Thanks!" comes through. Short sign-offs dictated on their own are no longer mistaken for background noise and dropped.
Waveforms with personality.
New
- Pick the overlay waveform you like. Settings now includes five waveform styles, including a thin Winamp-style line, so the dictation overlay can match your theme and feel.
Improved
- The large overlay is tighter. The button row and waveform area use less padding while keeping the controls easy to hit.
Updates bring Settings back.
Fixed
- Settings comes back after an update restart. When you update from Settings, Whurd now reopens Settings after relaunch instead of leaving you in the tray. Future updates also restore the same window position.
Settings stays put.
Fixed
- The Settings window no longer resizes. Settings now opens at the normal compact size and stays there, with maximize and fullscreen blocked.
Clearer at a glance.
Improved
- The welcome screen says what it does. "Sign in or create your account": one email box does both, and the copy now makes that explicit.
- The version is always in view. A small version tag now sits at the bottom of the Settings sidebar and on the welcome screen, so you always know what build you're on.
Accounts, for real.
New
- Whurd accounts are live. Sign-in now runs on Whurd's production account service: verification codes arrive from whurd.app, with no development banner. Accounts created during the early test period don't carry over, so sign up once more and you're set.
Sign-up, unstuck.
Fixed
- Creating an account now completes. Sign-up could verify your email and then stall, leaving retries stuck on "already verified". Account creation finishes properly now, and if a code has already been used you get a clear prompt to request a fresh one.
Always know who's signed in.
New
- Your account lives in the sidebar. The bottom of Settings now always shows your account: a Sign in button when you're signed out, and your email with your plan once you're in. One click takes you to the full Account page, which also takes over the old License tab's name.
The front door.
New
- A proper sign-in screen. When you're signed out, Whurd now greets you at launch with a focused welcome window: email, 6-digit code, done. No more hunting through Settings. It's also one click away in the tray menu, and closing it is always fine: free dictation works without an account.
Fixed
- Update progress, readable in every theme. The "Downloading" pill in the Settings titlebar no longer dims into mud on warm palettes; it keeps full contrast and draws a clean progress line instead.
Time saved, tuned to you.
New
- Set your own typing speed. Your "time saved" has always been measured against a typical 40 words-per-minute typist. If you know your real typing speed, click the WPM figure on your Voice Profile and change it: every saved-time number, past and future, recalculates against your honest baseline. If you don't know it, leave it be and nothing changes.
- Accounts are created in the app. Signing in with a new email now creates your Whurd account on the spot: same email, same 6-digit code, no password, no browser hop.
Fixed
- Sign-in works out of the box. Fresh installs no longer report "sign-in is not configured in this build".
- Reliable installer. The Windows build could previously ship with corrupted internals and fail to launch. Every release is now verified file by file and boot-tested before it goes out.
Sign in, speak, done.
Whurd is now a fully managed service. Create an account, press the hotkey, and talk: no setup, no configuration, nothing to maintain.
New
- Whurd accounts. Sign in with your email right inside Settings. Your plan follows you, and there is nothing to configure.
- Managed dictation service. Transcription and AI formatting now run through Whurd's own service. Open the app and talk; we handle everything behind the scenes.
- Free plan and Pro. 2,000 words a day free, forever. Pro removes the cap and unlocks the full formatting layer, with a 14-day trial and checkout built into the app.
- Streaming transcription. Long dictations are transcribed in pieces while you keep talking, so the finished text lands much faster after you stop.
- Offline recovery. If your connection drops mid-thought, the dictation is kept safe on your device and sent automatically the moment you are back online.
Improved
- Short phrases take a faster path through the pipeline and return almost instantly.
- Pasting is gentler on your clipboard: whatever you had copied before dictating, including images, is restored after the text lands.
- A refreshed overlay: quieter, draggable, and easier to read at a glance.
- A sharper Settings design to match the rest of the app.
Polish you can hear.
Small details, big feel: gentle audio cues, an escape hatch for a hot mic, and the privacy features we promised, now in the app.
New
- Soft audio cues. A gentle chime up when recording starts, down when it stops, and a low blip if something goes wrong. Synthesized in-app, quiet by design, and easy to switch off in Settings.
- Press Esc to cancel. While the mic is hot, Esc discards the recording: nothing is transcribed, nothing is pasted.
- Privacy Mode. Flip it on and dictation history never touches disk. Aggregate stats (counts only, never content) still work.
- Snippets. Say a trigger phrase ("insert my sign-off") and a saved block pastes in its place. Define them in Settings · Vocabulary.
- Smarter command mode. "Make this a bulleted list" and friends now reshape the dictation instead of being typed out.
Fixed
- Canceling a dictation now reliably discards the audio instead of pasting it anyway.
- A microphone error mid-recording now resets the session cleanly.
- Overlay status messages no longer vanish early (or linger) when dictations overlap.
- "Your rhythm" insights on the Voice Profile now compute correctly.
- Clearer, calmer error messages throughout.
Hello, Whurd.
The first public build. Press a hotkey, talk into any Windows app, and get clean text back: filler removed, punctuation fixed, styled for where you're writing.
New
- System-wide dictation. Hold Ctrl+Win and talk, from anywhere. The dictation HUD never steals focus from your active app.
- Fast transcription. Speech-to-text built to keep up with everyday writing.
- Smart formatting. Automatic filler removal, punctuation, capitalization, and sentence repair so the text reads like you wrote it on purpose.
- Per-app auto-styles. Output adapts to the active app: crisp for Slack, formal for email, terse for a commit message.
- Custom dictionary. Teach Whurd your names, jargon, and code symbols so they spell correctly every time.
- Command mode. Say "make this a bulleted list" and have the text restructure on the fly.
- Voice Profile analytics. Track words dictated, time saved, and WPM over time, with achievements. Stored locally.
- 99 languages. Dictate in the language you think in.
- Privacy Mode. Keep dictation history off-disk entirely, available on the free tier.
Privacy
- Voice audio is used only for transcription, then discarded. Never stored, never used to train.
- Dictation history and settings are stored locally on your machine.
- AI-training opt-in ships off by default.
Known limitations
- Windows 10 and 11 only for this release.
- Per-app styles cover the most common apps; more profiles land in upcoming builds.