Changelog

First public release.

• Record what you say together with what you were looking at — the whole screen or an area of it — from the menu bar, the library window, or a double-tap of the right Option key.
• Transcription runs on your Mac. Parakeet handles the 25 languages it covers and local Whisper takes the rest. The download is about 30 MB because the speech models are not in it: on first launch Spake downloads, in the background, the speech model for your language, about 714 MB, or about 1.3 GB when it needs both models, as it does for automatic language detection. Setup also offers the second model (about 574 MB, for language detection and 75 more languages), and it otherwise downloads the first time a language change or a note needs it. You can record right away, and notes transcribe when the model arrives. Downloads resume after an interruption, are checked against a SHA-256 checksum, wait and ask on a metered connection, and can be paused. No audio, screen content, or note text reaches a speech service. There is no account and no sign-in.
• System audio is recorded alongside the microphone by default; Settings → Recording turns it off. Each source keeps its own transcript, and a local model (a 22 MB download) puts names to the voices. Correct a name, or tell Spake to remember that voice for later notes.
• A note is a folder: Markdown, JSON, WAV, MP4, and the frames sampled from the recording, inside a library folder you choose. Delete Spake and every note still opens.
• Play a recording against its transcript word by word, with captions over the video.
• Search titles, spoken words, labels, and the text recognized on screen. Favorite a note to keep it at the head of the list. The inspector offers related notes from the same library, ranked locally. Search runs on an index kept in Application Support, which Spake rebuilds from your note folders if you delete it.
• A notification appears when a note is ready. It shows only the note's title by default; Settings → General can add the first line and a frame from the recording.
• Optional on-device translation, so titles and labels can be suggested for notes spoken in a language Apple's model does not cover. It never changes the transcript. The 1.9 GB translation model is downloaded only after Spake asks you, unless you turn on Download additional languages when needed in Settings → Intelligence.
• Every build includes the spake command line, and each launch links it at ~/.local/bin/spake unless a file is already there. An automation can hand a finished note to a script of yours once its transcript is saved.
• The interface is available in 17 languages, in 18 locale catalogs — Mandarin Chinese has one for each script. Every language but English was translated by a machine and has not been read by a speaker of it. Each non-English entry in the language picker says so. A system language Spake does not bundle gets English.
• Once a day Spake asks spake.app whether a newer version exists and says what it found. The feed and the archive are signed. Downloading and installing stay your decision, and Settings → General turns the check off.
• A 14-day trial starts at first launch. A license is $29, once, for up to three Macs. When the trial ends, only recording stops.