2026-11-12
- The follow-up question field and its Send button now look like one control: the field has square right corners and shares a single border with the button. The microphone button no longer turns into a solid gray block while an answer is being generated, and its hover and recording fills stay inside the field's border, in the follow-up field and in the search field.
2026-11-09
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The in-browser engine, wllama, moves from 3.8.1 to 3.13.0. It now handles a model download that stopped midway by itself, so MiniSearch no longer deletes those files before each load.
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Dictation's on-device model is now Qwen3-ASR 0.6B, run through wllama, instead of Moonshine. It understands every language MiniSearch answers in, not only English, so the setting that prefers it is now on by default for every browser; a profile saved before keeps its value, so a non-English profile turns it on in the Voice settings. The text now appears when the user stops recording rather than while they speak (about 2 seconds for a short query on WebGPU), and a recording ends on its own after two minutes. The first press downloads about 700 MB from Hugging Face, against 51 MB before, and later presses load it from the browser's storage in about 2 seconds; leaving the page or turning dictation off mid-download aborts it. The Moonshine runtime leaves the build, which shrinks from 35.7 MB to 22.2 MB, and the
/dictation-models/route andDICTATION_MODELS_DIRare gone, since the server no longer serves model files.docs/speech-model-evaluation.mdrecords the speech models tried for dictation and reading aloud, and why the others were turned down. -
Reading answers aloud now speaks the answer's language. With no voice chosen, the voice is picked for the language the answer is written in, detected with
franc-min, instead of the browser's: on an English browser, an answer in Portuguese is read by a Portuguese voice. The Voice settings panel lists every local voice (124 in 34 languages today) grouped by language, with the browser's language first, where it used to list only the browser's language, and the engine is no longer labeled "English-only". The detector is a new dependency, a 109 KB script (51 KB compressed) loaded on the first Listen press rather than with the page. A browser language the detector does not know (Danish, Finnish and Catalan among them) keeps its voice, as before, and a chosen voice reads every answer. Japanese, Korean and Hindi have no local voice, so their answers are read by an OS voice of that language.
2026-11-08
- MiniSearch now checks that the GPU can run wllama's shaders before using it, instead of only checking that the browser has WebGPU. The shaders use subgroups and the
subgroup_idbuiltin, so the GPU is used only when the browser's shader compiler supportssubgroup_id, an adapter answers within 5 seconds, it is not a software fallback, and it has thesubgroupsfeature. Otherwise the model runs on the CPU and a new profile starts on the CPU default model. On Chrome 137, which has WebGPU but notsubgroup_id, every model used to abort; it now answers on the CPU with LittleLamb 290M. The logs say which check failed.