Every release, dated, in plain words. You pay once and every one of these is included. Since v1.4.0 updates download on their own and install the next time TAWK opens, and your licence and settings carry over.
The microphone is off until you need it. TAWK used to keep your microphone open all the time, so the orange dot at the top of your screen never went away. Nothing was ever kept while you were not dictating, but the dot said otherwise. Now the microphone opens when you press the key and closes 5 minutes after your last dictation, so the dot only shows while you use TAWK. If you use headphones as your microphone, they also stop dropping to call quality. Talk the second your Mac wakes. After you opened the lid, the first dictation could come back empty, because the microphone was still waking up. TAWK now notices your Mac going to sleep and waking, and opens a fresh microphone on your first press. If the microphone still gives silence, the bar tells you, so you know to try again. Thank you to Neil for reporting it.
One tap stops hands free. Double tap to start, one tap to stop. If you go quiet for a minute it stops on its own, and it never runs past 15 minutes. Dictations over a minute are kept on your Mac for up to 7 days, and if one comes out wrong, Transcribe again in the menu writes it out a second time. Dictations longer than two minutes are now written in pieces at your natural pauses, so the end never gets cut. The Writing box stays up until your words are typed, even if you press the key again straight after stopping. TAWK opens when your Mac starts, now on for everyone, and it remembers if you switch it off. A few anonymous milestones. TAWK now sends a handful of counters, like “used 1,000 words”, so we can see where people get stuck. Never your audio, never your words. Setup has an optional box for your email. $59, once. TAWK now costs $59 and works on up to 3 of your Macs. If you already own it, nothing changes for you.
Updates can no longer get stuck. If TAWK was opened straight from the download window instead of from Applications, an update could not replace it and TAWK kept closing and reopening every few seconds. Now it never tries an update it cannot finish, and it tries any one update at most twice. One click to move into Applications. Open TAWK from the download and it offers to move itself into your Applications folder, where it keeps itself up to date and keeps its permissions. A second copy of TAWK in Applications is spotted too, and can go to the Trash. Your licence, plainly. Clicking your licence line in the menu now just confirms it is yours, instead of opening the screen for pasting a key.
No more lost words. A filter meant to skip silence was also cutting real speech, most often the first or last few words of what you said. Across 213 real dictations it dropped 6 words in every 100. It is gone, and every new version is now checked against those same recordings before it ships. The hold key repairs itself. If macOS stops passing the key to TAWK, it is switched back on within 3 seconds, so you no longer need to quit and reopen TAWK. And a short sentence in another language is no longer turned into silence when TAWK is unsure which language it heard.
Updates install themselves. Until now a new version downloaded quietly and then waited for the next time you opened TAWK. Nobody quits a menu bar app, so people sat on old versions with the fix already on their Mac. TAWK now puts it in once you have not spoken for ten minutes, and never mid sentence. A newer release also no longer waits behind an older one that was already downloaded, which could leave a Mac two versions behind. A microphone that stops without going quiet is now noticed and repaired, and if the engine ever returns one phrase over and over it is folded to a single copy instead of being typed into your document. The About page shows its version properly, and Check for Updates now tells you what it found.
TAWK wakes up with your Mac. If you closed your laptop and opened it again, TAWK could be deaf until you quit and reopened it. When a Mac sleeps, macOS drops the microphone but still tells apps everything is fine, so TAWK sat there recording silence. It now checks whether sound is actually arriving rather than believing what it is told, and it repairs the microphone on its own within five seconds. Thank you to Neil for reporting it.
The listening bar appears for quiet voices again. When 1.4.4 changed how TAWK reads the microphone, it also started measuring your loudness over a 20 millisecond window instead of a 1 millisecond one. Averaged over that long, speech reads about half as loud as it really is. If you speak softly, or sit back from the mic, the bar never appeared and your words were thrown away as silence. TAWK now measures the loudest moment in each millisecond, so the level means exactly what it meant before. Every one of the 22 real recordings that failed this way now works, and a keyboard click still does not wake the bar.
Switching languages works again. 1.4.4 tried to be clever: it remembered the language of your last longer sentence and used it for short ones. If you speak two languages that was wrong. A short Urdu sentence after an English one came out as English, and looked like TAWK repeating the previous line. Every sentence is now detected on its own again, and the remembered language is only used when Whisper is genuinely unsure (under 50 percent) on a clip shorter than 3 seconds.
Long dictations keep all their words. When something else on your Mac was busy, the microphone could quietly drop pieces of your audio, and a two minute hands free dictation came back as a few sentences with the middle missing. In our own logs 3 to 4 percent of every recording was being lost on an ordinary day, and up to 84 percent when another part of TAWK was working hard. TAWK now reads the microphone in 20 millisecond blocks with a deep buffer, and the loss in testing is 0.1 percent. Short sentences stay in your language. A one second "yes" after an English paragraph is English, not a guess: TAWK remembers the language of your last longer sentence and uses it for the short ones. You can pin a language for good with "language": "en" in ~/.tawk/config.json. For anyone helping us chase a bad transcription, "keep_audio": true saves each recording to ~/.tawk/audio, on your Mac only, off by default.
The listening bar is back. In 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 the bar could stop appearing after a while, even though TAWK was hearing you fine. It shows on every dictation again, and it is ready the moment you press the key.
Ten times the free taste. 5,000 free words before TAWK asks for anything, up from 500. That is around half an hour of talking, a working week for a heavy user, and long enough for the menu to show you the hours of typing it has already saved you. If you had used up your 500, you have 4,500 more now.
Press again straight away and nothing is lost. If you let go, then pressed the key again while the last sentence was still being written, the bar could stay hidden and that new dictation was sometimes thrown away as silence. Twelve times in our own logs. Fixed. This is also the first update that arrived on its own: if you are reading this on 1.4.1, the self installing update worked.
TAWK now knows when you are not talking. Silence and room noise never reach the engine any more, so the stray "Thank you." at the start of a sentence, and the odd "Thanks for watching" after a long pause, are gone. A real thank you still types. Double tap is more forgiving, a slightly slow first tap now counts. And updates download on their own and install themselves the next time TAWK opens.
TAWK keeps score. The first line of the menu is now how much typing it has saved you, counted on your Mac and nowhere else. And update checks now run reliably on Macs that stay on for days, so news like this page reaches you without a relaunch.
The menu now shows how much typing TAWK has saved you. Counted on your Mac from your own dictations. Nothing is sent anywhere, like everything else.
Long dictations fixed. A two minute hands free ramble no longer risks falling apart into repeated phrases near the end.
Silence stays silent. A held key with nothing said never invents a sentence. Changing the shortcut no longer starts a stray dictation.
One click updates. The menu bar tells you a new version exists; one click swaps it in and relaunches. This page is the last time updating is ever a chore.
The Words feature. Teach TAWK your names, products and jargon, and correct anything it keeps getting wrong. Plus a real Settings window: Shortcut, Words, Permissions, About.
Hold to talk fixed for every Mac. Some machines silently dropped the key event; TAWK now listens for it two independent ways.
Groundwork for the hold to talk fix, and long hold reliability.
The daily version check. Once a day TAWK asks gettawk.com whether a newer version exists. Nothing about you goes with the question.
The listening bar shows over full screen apps. And a bumped key can no longer paste a phantom sentence from 0.3 seconds of nothing.
First run reliability on Macs that had just granted permissions.
The model moved inside the app. No 483MB download on first launch, works offline from the first second, and transcription got roughly 3x faster.
Stability and paste reliability across more apps.
Intel Mac support matured; both architectures ship every release since.
Accuracy and hotkey handling improvements.
The hold to talk model of dictation: hold, talk, let go.
TAWK ships. One key, your voice, text at the cursor, all of it on your Mac.