Dictate 5.3.0 is about the two things you do most: talking to your phone and typing on it. The mic key can now be held like a voice message, autocorrect was rebuilt to read where your fingers actually land, on-device models write while you speak, and 45 languages that had been missing are back. Updating shows a new What's-new tour for 5.3 — and every tour stays re-viewable under Settings › About.
🎤 Push to talk
- Hold the mic, release to send — like a voice message: hold the mic key and talk, let go and it goes. Slide left to throw the recording away, drag up to lock it hands-free. A quick tap still starts a recording the way it always did, so nothing you already knew stops working. Opt-in under the Dictate settings. (#235)
- The held mic grows out of the key it replaces without jumping, keeps its centre wherever the key sits, and behaves the same with or without the rewording row. It works in real-time mode too, and it deliberately stays out of the classic keyboard-free layout, where the record button already owns the press.
⌨️ Typing
- Autocorrect, rebuilt — corrections are now decided from the touch coordinates, searching the likely words with a beam search as you type, instead of guessing from the finished word. On our test set that moved accuracy from 88.4% to 97.9%; the difference shows up most on fast, sloppy typing. (#242)
- German nouns are capitalised even when typed in lowercase. (#242)
- Next-word prediction — the suggestion strip offers what usually comes next, learned from how you write, and any word can be added to your dictionary with a long press, so names and jargon stop being corrected. (#241, #245)
📴 Offline
- On-device live transcription — downloadable streaming models transcribe while you speak rather than only when you finish, in ten languages (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish and Hebrew). (#233)
- Two new one-shot models — Canary 180M Flash covers English, German, French and Spanish in 207 MB, under a third of Parakeet's footprint at comparable accuracy, and GigaAM v2 is specialised in Russian. (#255)
- The on-device attributions screen now covers every shipped model.
🌍 Languages
- 45 languages added — Croatian, Bengali, Swahili and 42 more. The catalog had gaps that had nothing to do with what the providers actually support; it is now built from what they can really do. (#252)
🎨 Interface
- Two new floating-button designs, both alive rather than illustrated: Aurora (light moving inside a sphere, its temperament set by what the app is doing) and Lattice (a sphere of dots that wires itself together while idle, ripples with your voice, and twists while your text is reworded — a faithful port of thinking-orbs). Both follow your accent colour. (#253)
- Every design now has the same footprint, the same distance to the screen edge whichever way it got there, and a cancel button cut from its own surface instead of a stock grey circle. (#253, #88)
- Every provider carries its own logo in the settings instead of a generic cloud.
- The recording indicator can be still, pulsing or voice-reactive. (#238)
- Settings dialogs keep a persistent scrollbar and stop content from sliding underneath it.
🔌 Providers & your own server
- OpenAI's
gpt-transcribeandgpt-live-transcribeare supported, and the realtime model picker is back. (#248) - A server of your own can stream too — if it speaks the OpenAI realtime protocol under
/v1/realtime, live transcription runs against it. (#249) - Wake a sleeping server — for the common self-hosting shape of a small always-on box in front of a GPU machine that sleeps, Dictate can send a throwaway request the moment a rewording is certain, so the machine has the whole dictation to boot in. Per-server and off by default. (#189)
- Provider fields show the effective model instead of an empty box. (#248)
📝 Output
- Prompt output can keep the original transcript beside it, so a rewording never costs you what you actually said. (#240)
- Paragraphs stop breaking after abbreviations, ordinals and initials. (#239)
⌚ Wear OS (5.3.0-w4)
- The watch settings no longer open the system keyboard switcher, whose text is clipped on a round display; the single remaining keyboard entry goes straight to the system input-method settings. (#106)
🔋 Under the hood
- Holding the mic and sliding no longer flips the classic layout out from under a running recording. (#235, #125)
- A push-to-talk hold survives the moment Compose ends its own pointer dispatch mid-press — the gesture is driven from the window's touch stream instead.
- On-device model selection can be tapped by name, not just by its radio button.