Blog

What we built, what we measured and what we threw away. Each note is dated the day it happened.

  1. Smart Keyboard: how it decides to change a wordSmart Keyboard fixes the wrong layout and simple typos on your Mac. How it decides, how we measured it, and what we turned off because it hurt.
  2. The trial is now a month, not two weeksFrom October 10 the trial after you sign up in the app lasts 30 days instead of 14. What it opens and how to get it.
  3. A smaller judge for your dictionary termsWe trained a small model to decide when a dictionary term replaces what the recognizer heard. It nearly matched one twice its size, three times faster.
  4. Report a bad dictation: the one time audio leaves your MacControl-Option-Command-B lets you send a badly recognized dictation to us. Exactly what you switch on, what is sent, and how long we keep it.
  5. Hold or tap: one dictation key, two ways to talkHold the dictation key for one phrase, tap it for the continuous secretary. One key, nothing extra in the menu, and the secretary is now free.
  6. Who is speaking: speaker labels in meeting recordingsMeeting transcripts now number the voices with Nemotron 3 Diarization. How we checked it by ear, what the numbers mean, and what stays off the network.
  7. Dictation got worse? Check the microphone firstA Bluetooth headset left the microphone at 27% volume and dictation started mishearing words. Now the panel warns you, and here is what to check.
  8. A new recognition model never installs without askingUntil now the app downloaded new recognition models silently. From today it asks first: Update or Not now. Here is exactly when and how often.
  9. We fine-tuned the recognizer on our own recordingsWhat we changed in Parakeet, which recipe won, which ideas did not help, and why we measure only on voices the model has never heard.
  10. Style prompts: examples beat rulesHow we tune the instructions behind style presets. Adding 'don't do X' made results worse. Showing an input and the right output made them better.
  11. We tried cleaning the audio first. It did not helpWe tested volume normalization, noise suppression and filters before recognition. Two made results worse, the rest changed nothing. Here is why.
  12. We measured cloud recognizers and stayed localOpenAI's recognizer made 3 to 4 points fewer word errors than ours on read-aloud phrases. We still decided against a cloud option. Here is why.
  13. Why we removed a recognizer that scored betterA Russian recognizer looked better on test phrases, but on live speech it wrote filler sounds and cut sentences. We removed it and learned a lesson.
  14. Term dictionaries, and the hint we hidWe tested three ways to get English terms right in Russian speech. The obvious one broke three times more phrases than it fixed, so we hid it.
  15. Why we built our own translatorApple's translation service crashed on Ukrainian in macOS 26, so we moved translation to our own models that run on your Mac.
  16. The app gets a name: VerbaIDEWhy we call the app VerbaIDE, what the name says to different readers, and why the logo is a willow branch and not a tree.
  17. The app and the site in English, Ukrainian and RussianThe app now speaks three languages, picks one from your system, and switches without a restart. The site picks Ukrainian by the visitor's country.
  18. Style presets without the cloud: what we measuredApple's on-device model rewrites dictation in a chosen tone. It does not know Russian, so text goes through English: the direct path worked 0 times in 30.
  19. Dictation into any field, and the secretaryHow dictation by hotkey and the long-session secretary mode work, and why the lack of punctuation in Apple's Russian recognition was a real problem.
  20. Why we skipped Apple's dictation for RussianApple's Russian dictation puts no punctuation in the text. That breaks translation and reading, so we chose the Parakeet model for Russian.
  21. Translating the text under your mouse pointerHold two keys, point at English text in any app, and get a translation and a dictionary entry next to the pointer. How it reads the text and keeps formatting.
  22. The first build: live subtitles with translationIn one day we built a menu-bar app that listens to a chosen app or microphone, writes English subtitles and translates them into Russian on the Mac.