v0.4.10 brings a command palette, full localization into 18 languages, smarter text expansions, major Windows upgrades, and a long list of reliability fixes driven directly by your reports. Thank you to everyone who filed them, many items below link straight back to your feedback.

New

Command Palette

Press Cmd+K (Ctrl+K on Windows) to jump to any page, setting, or action in Vowen from one quick launcher. If you know what you want, you no longer need to know where it lives.

Vowen in 18 Languages

The entire interface is now localized: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, and English. You can pick your language during onboarding or change it anytime in settings.

Fill-In Fields in Expansions

Add {{placeholders}} to any expansion and Vowen pops up a quick form to complete them as the expansion fires. Placeholders support free text and dropdown options, and a new variable library (gear icon on the Expansions page) lets you define values once and reuse them across expansions.

Hold or Tap — Per-Shortcut Recording Modes

Each recording shortcut can now work as hold-to-talk or tap-to-toggle, configured individually right where you bind the shortcut.

Speaker Diarization on Windows (Pro)

Meeting notes and file transcriptions on Windows can now label who said what, powered by on-device speaker detection — the same capability Mac users already had.

Configurable Cancel Shortcut

The key that cancels a recording (Esc by default) is now a real, rebindable shortcut. Map it to anything, or disable it entirely if Esc conflicts with your editor.

Meeting Notes from the Tray

Start, pause, resume, and stop meeting notes straight from the tray menu — no need to open the main window.

Keep Obsidian in Sync (Pro)

A new "Keep notes synced" option re-syncs a note to your Obsidian vault whenever you edit it, so the vault copy never goes stale.

"Navigate To" in Workflows

A new built-in workflow step opens any website by voice. Workflow URLs also no longer require the https:// prefix — Vowen adds it for you.

Resource-Efficient Mode for Parakeet (Windows)

An optional mode keeps Parakeet fully unloaded until you record, trading a little startup speed for lower idle memory use on modest machines.

Improved

• Much faster Parakeet on Windows — Parakeet now runs as a warm background service, so transcription starts instantly instead of reloading the model on every dictation.

• Quick thread dictations skip the AI step — saying just a thread trigger (or a trigger plus a few words) pastes your snippet directly, with no AI-enhancement round-trip.

• Connector logins, rebuilt (Pro) — connecting external tools now completes the whole OAuth sign-in inside Vowen, with tokens stored encrypted.

• Completion sound for file transcriptions — switch away while a long file processes; Vowen tells you when it's done.

• Easier dictionary & thread management — a quick-entry field for dictionary words, plus new import buttons for both dictionary words and threads.

• Polished tags, filters & settings — smoother tag picking, a clear-filters button, scroll positions that survive navigation, and refreshed meeting-notes settings and permissions screens.

• Meeting pill hidden from screen shares — the recording indicator is excluded from screen capture, so it never appears in shares or screenshots.

• Silent recordings are kept, not lost — recordings over a minute that turn out silent are saved to history with a retry option instead of being discarded.

Fixed

• Long dictations that decoded to empty text under heavy load are now retried automatically instead of silently producing nothing.

• Dictation no longer dies mid-recording after a mic or input-source change — a watchdog detects the stall and rebuilds the stream on the spot. (macOS)

• Recordings no longer get stuck on "listening" when macOS disables and Vowen restores its keyboard listener — in-flight recordings are finalized and transcribed. (macOS)

• The meeting-notes pill no longer vanishes, drifts off-screen, or ignores button clicks. (Windows)

• Meeting notes now capture computer audio from every active output — including virtual audio devices — instead of only the default speaker. (Windows)

• Choosing a specific microphone now reliably records from that device instead of quietly falling back to the system default. (Windows)

• Custom APIs serving local thinking models (like Qwen3) no longer fail the connection test while the model is still reasoning.

• Clicking "Start taking notes" on the meeting banner works even when the settings window has been closed.

• The hide-dock-icon setting is respected when Vowen starts at login. (macOS)

• Regenerating a meeting summary no longer overwrites a title you edited by hand.

• Small local models replying with an empty message alongside tool calls no longer paste raw JSON in command mode.

• Changing the transcription language for meeting notes now applies correctly to the next recording.

How to update: Vowen will prompt you with the in-app update banner, or download the latest from vowen.ai.

As always — if anything feels off after updating, post it here and we'll jump on it.