Changelog

Recordings now go wherever you want them. Point Vowen at any folder and it files them under Dictation, Meetings and Imports. Google Calendar connects as well, so each meeting note takes the name of the event it belongs to.

When a streaming provider hangs up mid-dictation, Vowen keeps the audio and raises a banner you can retry from. It used to go quiet and lose the recording.

New

• Choose where recordings live. Point Vowen at any folder and it files recordings under Dictation, Meetings and Imports.

• Google Calendar. Connect your calendar and each meeting note takes the name of the event it belongs to. Pro

• Keep the audio when a provider drops. A streaming connection that hangs up mid-dictation raises a banner you can retry from.

• A guided tour of meeting notes. The indicator and the meeting panel walk you through themselves on your first few notes.

• Gemini 3.8. Gemini 3.8 Flash is now the recommended model for AI enhancement and command mode.

• OpenRouter for dictation. Dictate through the speech models OpenRouter carries, using your own key.

• Hyper key shortcuts. A shortcut can be bound to a Hyper key remapped from Caps Lock.

• Auto-export from a watched folder. Each watched folder can write its transcript out as text or subtitles when it finishes.

• Sound effect volume. A slider in Audio settings sets how loud the start, stop and alert cues are.

• Open the meeting panel from the indicator. Hover the indicator and a button opens the panel without touching the keyboard.

Improved

• Onboarding, rebuilt. First run opens in its own window and takes a shorter path to a working shortcut.

• Note tags reach Obsidian. A note's tags are written into the vault's frontmatter, where Obsidian indexes them.

• Webhooks carry the transcript. The payload now includes the full transcript and the note id alongside the summary.

• Reminders beyond a day. Reminders can be set further out than 24 hours, and chime when they come due.

• Exports without timestamps. Timestamps can be left out of a transcript export, in single and batch exports alike.

Fixed

• Punctuation shortcuts on non-US layouts. Keys on the punctuation row now match on AZERTY, QWERTZ and others. Windows

• Diarization on Windows. Speaker labels no longer split one person across a dozen speakers. Windows

• Browser icons bringing the app down. Reading a browser's icon could crash Vowen. It now reads the app bundle directly. macOS

• The meeting panel shortcut on UK layouts. Shortcut matching moved off the system table, so bindings like Ctrl+# register again.

New

• Reminders you set by voice. Ask command mode to remind you about something at five, or in twenty minutes, and Vowen brings it back in its own banner. It survives sleep, so one that comes due while the lid is shut still arrives when you open it.

• Gemini 3.5 Transcribe. Google's dedicated speech model is now a provider. Dictation streams word by word, files and meetings come back with native speaker labels, and your dictionary reaches it as a real biasing field instead of a prompt.

• Choose which Gemini model transcribes. The Gemini card carries a choice between gemini-3.5-transcribe and gemini-3.5-flash, so the general-purpose model stays available for anyone who prefers it.

• Drop a file anywhere on the Transcribe page and the dialog opens with it attached, instead of you having to open the dialog first.

• The macOS Share menu, Open With, and dock drops all hand files to the same place. Vowen selects them in the Transcribe dialog rather than transcribing on its own, so the model, language and diarization choices stay yours.

• Drags from Voice Memos, Photos and Mail. Those apps hand over a file promise rather than a file, which Chromium cannot read, so the drag used to do nothing at all. Vowen now resolves them natively while the Transcribe dialog is open. (macOS)

• Timers say when they are done. A timer set through command mode raises a banner the moment it runs out, instead of finishing quietly.

• Mute either side of a meeting, mid-meeting. Hover the meeting indicator for separate mutes for your microphone and for system audio, live on the running recording. Switching system audio on stands the capture up without restarting.

• Play a recording from the voice log. Press and hold any entry on the home page and its audio opens in place, with the same player the notes and transcription pages use.

• Screenshots that reach Claude Code and Codex. Pointing at things while dictating into a terminal agent now works. A terminal cannot carry an image, so Vowen sends the chord those agents listen for and they read the screenshot off the clipboard themselves. (macOS)

Improved

• Meetings that run for hours. Audio is compressed before it is uploaded and request timeouts scale with the size of what is being sent, so long recordings stop failing on the clock rather than on anything the provider did.

• A live preview that reconnects. Every streaming provider hangs up eventually: Gemini at ten minutes, Deepgram and OpenAI at an hour, AssemblyAI at three. The preview notices and re-opens instead of going quiet for the rest of the meeting.

• One card on the meeting indicator, not two. The hover card lost the notes panel that duplicated the meeting panel, and teaches the panel shortcut as real keycaps instead. It also stops opening revealed just because the cursor was already where it appeared.

• Integrations settings, rebuilt. Calendar, Obsidian, webhooks and export in meeting-notes settings now share one layout, with what each one saves shown as cards rather than a column of switches.

• Watch folders that read as a list, with what happens to each folder stated on its own row.

• Half a second to cancel. Holding the stop button to throw a take away takes about half a second now, down from over a second, and the ring around the button fills in step with it.

• Space plays, everywhere. Space toggles playback in every player in the app, and the angle brackets step the speed. Both stand down while you are typing or while a button has focus.

• A transcript editor that keeps up. Typing in a long transcript re-rendered every row on every keystroke, which is exactly the lag it felt like. Editing is smooth now, whatever the length.

• Cmd+F in settings (Ctrl+F on Windows) focuses the settings search box, the way it already did on the notes, dictionary and transcribe pages.

• A quieter sidebar. Dropped the section heading over the AI pages.

Fixed

• A stray space and a missing capital in Electron apps. Chromium apps take seconds to build the accessibility tree Vowen reads the caret from, and VS Code measured over four. Vowen now warms that tree when you switch apps, and when it still cannot read the caret it leaves your text exactly as dictated. (macOS)

• A button read as an empty text field. A focused button answers the caret questions anyway, and answers them as though it were an empty field at the start of a sentence. Smart spacing now only acts on something that really is a text field. (macOS)

• Instructions that pinned a language and kept one. Custom instructions asking for output in one language while also asking to keep the language you spoke translated every dictation into the pinned one. The language you spoke now wins that contradiction.

• The connectors catalog failing to search. Composio started appending a note about custom servers to its search results, which made every catalog search come back unreadable.

• A console window flashing when speaker detection runs. Speaker detection and the local speech engines spawned a visible console window on every run. Those are hidden now. (Windows)

• Speaker detection timing out on long meetings. It was given a flat ten minutes regardless of length, so an hour-long meeting was killed while it was still working. The budget scales with the recording now, and a run that does blow it no longer leaves your retry queued behind it. (Windows)

• Pausing apps that publish no metadata. An app can own the media session without publishing a title, Stremio among them, and those could not be paused at all. Vowen reads the playing state directly now and pauses them instead of muting your Mac. (macOS)

• Settings jumping to the front when notes start. Starting meeting notes from the idle pill, a shortcut or a meeting banner brought the settings window forward over whatever you were in. It stays where it was, and only comes up when something genuinely needs you.

• A failed note opening on the wrong tab. A note whose summary failed opened on Transcript, the one tab that cannot show why. It opens on Summary now, with the reason rendered read only so a keystroke cannot save it over the note.

A short release: one new feature, and three fixes.

New

Capture screenshots while dictating (Pro, macOS and Windows) — Cmd+click, or Ctrl+click on Windows, while a hands-free or Tap-mode dictation is running, and Vowen captures a screenshot cropped to whatever you pointed at, with that area ringed and the rest of the screen dimmed. The shots go into the field after your transcript, so a prompt can show the thing it describes instead of wording it. Only modified clicks count, so you are not left pruning a pile of screenshots afterwards, and six a dictation is the ceiling. It stays off until you switch it on in Settings → Experimental. Vowen uploads nothing: the images go onto the clipboard and into the app you chose to dictate into.

Improved

Meeting notes and transcriptions stop being evicted - Both lists were capped at 100 when database fails to setup, and every write past that deleted the oldest entry, with no warning and no way to get it back. That cap is gone for both, so neither list drops anything unless you delete it.

A switch for the drag-to-insert banner (macOS) — Settings → General now has a toggle for the banner that appears when a dictation ends with nothing editable focused. It is on by default, because pasting into a window that cannot receive the text loses the dictation outright. Turn it off if an app misreports its focused field and you would rather Vowen always pasted, which is what it did before 0.5.3.

Fixed

Tone instructions coming back half-applied — A tone that asked for a translation, or a noticeably different register, returned text that had barely moved. Your instructions were read before the rule that keeps output in the language you spoke, and the later rule won. They are now the last thing the model reads before your transcript, and they outrank both that rule and the default restraint. If you asked for a rewrite, you get the rewrite.

Smart capitalization overriding your own casing rules — A tone asking for all lowercase had its first letter capitalized straight back by smart spacing, so your own rule lost to an automatic one. A tone now owns the casing for that dictation. Spacing and terminal punctuation still apply.

The drag-to-insert banner appearing in Google Docs and Typora (macOS) — Canvas-rendered editors report the document rather than the caret inside it, and so does any app whose accessibility tree has not finished waking. That looks identical to having nothing focused, so the banner appeared instead of a paste in some of the most common places people dictate. Cmd+V always worked in those editors, so they now paste.

To update, open Vowen and it will pick this up automatically, or download the latest build from vowen.ai.