Media pause

Dictation now pauses whatever is playing, music or a podcast, the moment you start talking, and resumes exactly what was playing when you stop. It runs alongside audio ducking rather than replacing it: ducking still quiets everything that is not a media player, game audio, calls, and alerts, while media pause handles the case ducking cannot, a voice talking over your own. On Linux it reaches any player, including a browser tab. On Mac it covers Apple Music and Spotify; a browser tab there still ducks instead of pausing. On by default on both.

Linux packages and Hyprland support

Alchemist now ships on Linux as a deb, an rpm, and an AUR package, alongside the AppImage, each one setting up the permissions dictation needs on install so there is no extra prompt afterward. Hyprland users get an automatic shortcut installer instead of a hand edited config file, a native hold to talk binding, and bare Escape to cancel a dictation, the same as KDE. Everywhere else on Linux, hold to talk now works by holding a single key, a picker in Settings offers Right Alt, Right Ctrl, Right Super, Left Alt or Left Ctrl, and Plasma gained a custom shortcut recorder of its own. Per app formatting and file tagging now work in Qt apps like Konsole, Kate, Dolphin and KMail on Plasma Wayland too.

New

• Added vocabulary auto learning on Mac and Linux: fix a word by hand once, and Alchemist writes the correction rule itself the next time it hears the same fix, no trip to Settings needed.
• Added verification on Whisper model downloads, so a corrupted download is caught and retried automatically instead of being handed to transcription.
• Added the End User License Agreement and Privacy Policy.

Improvements

• Moved the pill flush above the taskbar on Plasma instead of landing behind it.
• Disabled Maintain Active Window by default on Mac and Windows; it was adding noticeable delay to every paste.
• Improved the clipboard restore on Mac and Windows to leave a fresh copy alone instead of overwriting it a moment later.
• Disabled the debug output Alchemist printed to the terminal on Linux.
• Extended code mode to Linux terminals by default, on existing installs too.
• Improved dictation on Linux to copy the text instead of pasting it when the focus is not on a text field.

No longer broken

• Fixed the pill failing to appear on the very first dictation after launching the app.
• Fixed media pause not working at all in installed Mac builds.
• Fixed every paste on Mac failing silently, with no explanation, when Accessibility access needed to be granted again; the app now names the problem and points at the fix.
• Fixed the Hyprland shortcut installer duplicating its bindings on every restart and removing the user's own Escape binding on uninstall.
• Fixed a crash in the Timeline when a fast search narrowed a long list of sessions.