Changelog

Tota spells what's on your screen

Tota now glances at the window you're dictating into and spells the names and labels you're looking at correctly — entirely on your Mac. Plus a new notch indicator, spoken formatting commands, and a stack of accuracy fixes.

• •Spell what's on your screen: names and labels visible in the window you're dictating into — and windows you glanced at just before — are spelled correctly. On by default; turn it off in Settings → Corrections
• •Context corrections show in the corrections card with one-click Revert and "don't correct again"
• •New notch indicator: on Macs with a notch, recording status hugs the notch with a live waveform and a transcribing animation
• •Say your formatting: spoken brackets and casing commands — "open bracket … close bracket", "all caps", "camel case", "snake case" — with a new onboarding step to learn them
• •"Hey Tota" hears you more reliably, with better recognition biasing and fuzzy matching for close pronunciations
• •Fixed: quiet trailing speech at the end of a dictation is no longer cut off
• •Fewer wrong autocorrections: everyday words are never rewritten, and low-confidence transcriptions no longer trigger biased rewrites
• •Glossaries now live behind a single switch at the top of the Glossaries page, off by default — flip it on if you use them
• •Smart Formatting: question marks no longer split a clause from its sentence, and the first format after your Mac wakes is much faster
• •Fixed: stray leading space when pasting into Gmail in Chrome, and mirrored error-banner text after wake

Analytics: your dictation at a glance

A new Analytics tab charts your words per minute, daily activity, and dictation streaks — plus which apps you dictate into and a few fun milestones.

• •New Analytics tab in the sidebar — also a click away from the stats at the top of Home
• •Words per minute over your last 30 days, with a trend against your all-time average
• •Daily activity heatmap with your current and longest dictation streaks
• •See which apps you dictate into most (counting starts with this update)
• •All-time milestones: books and pages written, time saved vs typing, weeks with Tota — and a naughty word counter
• •Your history is rebuilt from your archives, so the heatmap and streaks reach back to your first dictation

Secure snippets: paste passwords with your voice

Store passwords and other secrets encrypted in your Mac's keychain, then paste them with a trigger phrase and Touch ID. Plus command-only snippets and new built-in commands.

• •Secure snippets: say the trigger, confirm with Touch ID, and Tota pastes the secret — never shown again after saving, never in history or logs
• •Snippets can be command-only: say the trigger on its own to insert, without it firing mid-dictation (the new default for new snippets)
• •Duplicate-trigger warning when a snippet clashes with another snippet, voice command, or macro
• •New built-in commands: "clear" (clears the current line), "new" (⌘N), and "next field" / "tab"
• •Clearer guidance when macOS secure keyboard entry pauses dictation shortcuts, with a wake-word tip

Talk straight into your macros, and take control of layout

Macros now accept dictation — say the trigger and keep talking to fill in the blanks. And three new spoken commands give you precise control over paragraphs, lines, and lists.

• •Macros can take dictation: say a macro trigger and keep talking — your words fill the macro's dictation slots, and saying "next field" jumps between them
• •Reorder macro steps by dragging; adjacent dictated-text steps get a Tab inserted between them automatically
• •New spoken layout commands: "new paragraph", "new line", and "new list" — say them mid-dictation or on their own
• •Fixed: dictating at the start of a line no longer inserts a stray leading space

Corrections you can't miss, and tidier Settings

When Tota learns a correction it now shows a clear card in the lower part of your screen — with an Undo button big enough to actually hit. Settings has been reorganised so every option is where you'd expect.

• •Learned corrections appear in an on-screen card with one-click Undo; multiple corrections from one dictation are grouped with Undo All
• •Settings reorganised into five clear tabs
• •Fixed: dictating into a terminal (like Claude Code) could teach the dictionary screen junk that then crept into future dictations
• •Glossary biasing is now off by default — switch one on in Settings → Vocabulary when you want it, and turning it off now sticks

A brand-new onboarding tour

Getting started with Tota is now a guided experience: fresh visuals, a privacy-first welcome, and live demos of what Tota can do along the way.

• •Switch on Smart Formatting during onboarding — the model download starts right away with progress shown
• •Preview the correction Undo pill and the transcription models before you finish setup
• •Fixed: recording could fail with an "Audio device unavailable" error right after switching microphones
• •Fixed: adding a custom voice command could duplicate built-in commands — custom commands are now clearly labelled

Tota 3.0 — Dictation you can rely on

Our biggest reliability release yet. Dictation now survives whatever your Mac throws at it mid-sentence.

• •Keep dictating while you switch apps — recording no longer stops when you ⌘Tab away
• •Smart paste guard: if you've moved to another app, Tota copies your text and prompts you to paste instead of typing into the wrong window
• •A clear on-screen alert when your microphone changes, and dictation shows which mic it's using
• •New English Spelling setting — choose UK (colour, realise) or US spelling
• •Smart Formatting lays out messages and letters properly, with greeting, body, and sign-off on their own lines

Audio Drop — transcribe any recording, with speaker labels

Drop an audio file into Tota and get a full transcript with automatic speaker labels — who said what, start to finish. All on your Mac, nothing uploaded.

• •Automatic speaker detection, with the option to rename speakers to real names
• •Export transcripts to plain text, Markdown, subtitles (SRT), JSON, or CSV
• •Flexible timestamps: once per speaker turn, every sentence, or off
• •A progress bar shows how far along your transcription is

Vocabulary & Glossaries

Teach Tota the names, jargon, and acronyms you actually use. It nudges transcription toward your terms, fixes common mishears, and can automatically pick the right glossary for the app you're dictating into.

• •Create multiple glossaries and switch between them
• •Per-app glossary mapping — your work terms in Slack, your project names in your editor
• •Faster Smart Formatting and a fix for occasional empty transcriptions

Smart Formatting — on-device AI cleanup

An optional AI model cleans up your dictation — fixing typos and misheard words and formatting lists — processed entirely on your Mac, like everything else in Tota.

• •Faster first transcription: the speech model warms up in the background at launch
• •Accurate download progress when fetching the Smart Formatting model

New website launched

Tota's new face lift is live — a fresh new home at heytota.com. Take a look around and let us know what you think.

Speak your language

Multilingual transcription arrives. Pick your language or let Tota auto-detect it, and dictate in far more than English.

Hands-free with the wake word

Say the wake word and start dictating — no keyboard required. Recording can now also stop automatically when you finish speaking.

Hold fn to talk

Hold the fn key to dictate, just like on iPhone. Plus a quick keyboard shortcut to open Settings and smarter filtering of stray artefacts in transcriptions.

Stay out of your way

Tota can now hide itself from the ⌘Tab app switcher so it never interrupts your flow, and voice commands got a round of usability improvements.

Tota 2.0 — solid foundations

A milestone release focused on making everything dependable: a hardened audio engine that copes with devices coming and going, smoother licensing, and a reorganised Settings that's easier to find your way around.

Loro becomes Tota

We renamed the app from Loro to Tota, gave it a new parrot icon in your menu bar, and launched a proper support page. Same app, better name.

Free trial, licensing, and your transcription archive

Tota gained a free trial and simple one-time licensing — no subscriptions, ever. We also added a searchable archive of your past transcriptions with stats, all stored privately on your Mac.

A fresh look and clipboard history

A full redesign with a warm colour palette and a cleaner sidebar layout, plus a new optional clipboard history so nothing you copy gets lost. Auto-updates switched on, so new versions now arrive on their own.

Voice commands and macros

Control your Mac by voice: switch apps, open websites and applications, and chain commands together into macros that run whole sequences from a single phrase.

Learning your words

The auto-learn dictionary arrived: correct a word once and Tota remembers it next time, with an undo if it learns something it shouldn't. Also added customisable keyboard shortcuts, clamshell mode support, a microphone picker, and fixes for dictating into Google Docs.

Tota launches 🎉

Version 1.0 goes live: private, on-device voice dictation for your Mac. Speak anywhere you can type and your words appear instantly — no internet needed, nothing leaves your machine. Launched with offline transcription out of the box, smart spacing and capitalisation, and customisable filler-word removal.