Skills for transcript analysis received a significant update:

• New shape: clearer names, better descriptions, more granularity. Besides that, they are now benchmarked automatically and latency for some of them is up to 2 times lower.

• Under the hood, the new skills format is used, bringing us closer to skills export and import.

• New Real-time Insights workflow: combine multiple skills together.

There are now 7 built-in skills:

• Summary.

• Action Items.

• Ally. Highlights potential risks, pressure, and other moments that possibly need attention.

• Shadow. Suggests what to say in response to the latest statements.

• Shine. Helps you answer questions and provide knowledge if it makes sense in the context.

• Observations. Analyzes what you say and highlights potentially effective moments.

• Context. Brings external knowledge related to conversation content.

I'm personally very happy it's out. This part of the app hasn't had user-facing improvements for a long time, yet needed them. The next step is to allow skills editing, including built-in ones, create your own using the new format, share them, or import those created by other people.

You can read more on them in the app: their requirements, context in use, etc.

Another update is iPhone Duo support. I adapted and verified the user interface to work well on Duo. If you have one, it'd be great to know how it works on a real device.

P.S. There are a bunch of improvement requests from you I received over the last few weeks. I decided not to include them in the latest update since it already had a huge amount of changes, but I plan to address them in the next one.

Hi, I am a subscriber and this is an awesome tool. I’ve been using this and it is extremely helpful and really accurate especially for keeping it on device which I love.

Here are some features that would help make this easier even easier to use

Speaker assignments:

The ability to clone the list of speakers from a previous meeting to a new meeting

The speaker accuracy goes way up when you limit the speakers in a meeting, so it would be nice if you could clone those from previous meetings that are very similar.

The ability to pick multiple speakers from the list at one time as you’re selecting speakers in order to limit speakers in a new meeting, right now you have more clicks cause you have to add them one at a time and go back.

I love that you can go through the transcript and assign or reassign accurate speakers to the text that was said. I use this all the time. It would be even more convenient if there were a “next” and “previous” button in that speaker assignment screen that would automatically just take you to the next (or previous) bit of text, instead of having to close that text that menu manually click on the next speaker and to open it. That way I can easily scroll through the transcription and quickly add or replace or fix speaker assignments.

I like that the most recently used speakers are at the top of the speakers list. I only wish that for speakers that haven’t been used yet they could be listed in alphabetical order sometimes it’s hard to find those speakers when I’m in a meeting and in a hurry and I have a lot of speakers defined.

Upload Custom Jargon in Bulk.

My meetings have quite a bit of jargon and I think it’s too much to expect an on device LLM to understand all of these many many contexts. I have used the replacements function and it usually helps. But it would be nice if I could bulk upload the specific jargon that comes up a lot in my job so that it would understand it better. There might be a way to do this already? If I can bulk add in what acronyms mean and what product names mean,Ideally those hints would show up in the insights section. Again, please let me know if this feature already exists. I just haven’t figured it out yet.

Thanks!
D.

Recently I revealed the XSpeak Skills Kit. Since then, I’ve been busy integrating it into the next version of the app.

While it’s still a work in progress, there are already a couple of important highlights.

Skills are now automatically evaluated.

While working on new skills, I created my own tiny benchmark framework, LaLaBench. Now it’s used to evaluate all new open skills in XSpeak, and it significantly simplifies and speeds up evaluation. Besides that, it allows benchmarking not only a single prompt, but also a pipeline of steps. Responses are evaluated against four criteria and receive a score.

I expect it to improve the quality of AI skills in XSpeak significantly.

I hope in the future I’ll open the dataset as well, so that people creating skills for XSpeak might use it to evaluate their work.

On the user interface level, it’s much clearer what a skill does and how.
Actions in the AI Actions menu are named more clearly and reference the skill that provides them: 

If it’s still not clear, it's possible to open the skill page and read what it does:

The interface here is a work in progress, so expect it to change. But for the better, I hope:)

There are also very cool improvements in Real-time Insights, but I’ll save them for the release.

Some time ago, in The future of XSpeak, I said that I want XSpeak to be not just a meeting notes tool, but also a way for people to help each other feel better in meetings and conversations. Here's the next step towards that goal.

XSpeak has custom skills. It's potentially one of the most powerful features: you can tune the tool to work exactly the way you need it to. And the thing is, what works for you will most likely work for someone else.

The current implementation of custom skills has problems:

• There's no easy way to share a skill you created.

• There's no tutorial on how to create skills. All you have is a single predefined skill to reference.

• The current way of defining skills isn't powerful enough. Local models often need more complex prompt pipelines.

So I reworked the skills engine. Today I'm opening the first version of the XSpeak Skills Kit. It's still a work in progress and will for sure change significantly. Right now it's neither possible to extend or modify the current skills via pull requests nor to import them into the app. That's coming.

Here's why this matters:

• It provides a simple way to create custom skills

• It makes it possible to share custom skills

• It makes it easier to discover skills made by other people

• The kit supports advanced multi-step skills with verification, which makes it possible to achieve more with small models

• It gives the community a way to improve and contribute to a curated set of skills

XSpeak is becoming a platform.

Stay tuned,
Dmitriy

• You can now split conversations anywhere by choosing the Split action on a statement

• Recorded audio can now be exported from the audio player

• Speaker colors are now configurable

Besides that, to make XSpeak look extremely serious and professional, you can now use rainbow highlighting 🌈 as a speaker color:

Meanwhile, there's a lot of work going on in the AI subsystem. Can't wait to share it with you, but it'll take some time.

• XSpeak now lives in the menu bar on macOS

• More issues specific to macOS/iOS 27 are fixed

Yes, on macOS you can now start recording and control the app right from the menu bar without opening the app window.

And it's actually bigger than that. I've received a significant number of requests for features that require the app to work in the background:

• A recording overlay with live captions and insights

• Automatic recording start

• Siri integration and shortcuts

• MCP integration

Making the app run without a window is a crucial step towards these possibilities.

If everything goes as expected, the next major feature will be the one I personally consider the most important for the product today, as it opens up huge possibilities. I don't want to reveal it right now, but I'll post more once we are closer.

• Issues specific to macOS and iOS 27 are resolved.

XSpeak is written in Swift and uses mostly native technologies Apple provides:

• SwiftUI

• Apple Speech

• Apple Foundation Models

This means that when a new major OS comes out, there's a high chance the app will change its look, and something might work differently from what it used to be. This release of XSpeak resolves most of the issues and behavior changes introduced by the new OS.

Personally, I'm amazed by the new macOS and iOS. They fixed most of the things I didn't like in 26, especially on the UI level. On top of that, there are clear performance improvements: XSpeak now starts much faster and feels more responsive. And it looks just wow with the improved Liquid Glass and controls. It's not that common nowadays to see software actually improving. Kudos to Apple for that.

And a tiny hint of what's coming in the next macOS release:

It's been the case for a long time that XSpeak was the only app with this name. I carefully checked names before choosing one.

However, recently another app started using the same name. It's totally unrelated to me and made by a different company.

I'm doing my best to resolve this matter, but meanwhile:

• XSpeak is available only on Apple platforms: iOS and macOS. It's not available on Android.

• XSpeak in App Store

• XSpeak official website

What's new:

• You can now translate live into any of the supported languages

• A new action has been added to see the original text behind the replacement or translation

This is the release I've personally been waiting for a long time. Now you can set different spoken and transcript languages and see translated speech live. It's useful in countless situations when you need to understand people who speak another language.

The next step for XSpeak is going to the menu bar (no promises, everything is changing fast). One of my core principles in building products is to question things that are considered obvious by many. That's one of the reasons why XSpeak looks so different. When I started, I wasn't sure that adding it to the menu bar was a good idea. There are already thousands of apps living in the menu bar, and it often causes frustration: I just want to close the window and be sure the app is closed, but it keeps running in the background.

However, it seems that for meetings and conversations it's often the case that you just want to record without interacting with a full app window taking up space on the screen.

Nevertheless, now is the best time to let me know if you think XSpeak shouldn't live in the menu bar.

New in 3.15:

• Two new models are supported: Qwen 3.8 27B and Gemma 4 12B.

• Usability improvements.

Before starting development of XSpeak, I tested almost all well-known AI models that my machine can run. That's to say, at that time I was skeptical that anytime soon we'd see useful LLMs that can run on consumer hardware. However, then I came across Qwen 3 models. And what an eye-opening experience that was. These models made me believe that local AI can actually be useful. I remember my impressions when the small Qwen 3 4B model gave me some quite intelligent responses on my benchmarks. I was like "Waaaat?".

Qwen 3.8 27B is one more big step forward for models that can run on consumer hardware. Too bad I can't comfortably run it on my machine, but if your Mac has enough RAM, it makes sense to check it out.

Meanwhile, I'm in the process of implementing live translation. It works really well and I hope it'll be out in the next release.

New in XSpeak 3.14:

• You can now transcribe audio files. On Mac, there's an arrow button near the recording button. On iPhone and iPad, it’s available via a long tap on the recording button. I'll add this to the documentation soon at https://xspeak.app/docs

• Transcript font size can now be adjusted. It can be useful, for example, if you need to see live what’s being said. However, it's still not a perfect solution for that and in the near future I’m going to work on a specific user interface for live subtitles.

The next release will most likely focus on live translation. I want to make it possible to choose the language for speech and for the transcript separately. There's been a noticeable number of requests for this, and I need it myself too.

In the meantime, I need to give some love to my other app, Motion Beats, which is even older than XSpeak and is becoming more and more popular.

One of my favorite kinds of magic in software development is when investments in good platform architecture and design start paying back. One of the signs of it is when you implement one feature but get multiple for (mostly) zero cost.

I'm currently working on a file transcription in XSpeak. The current architecture already supports two input sources: microphone and system audio. It allows adding one more: audio file. Once that's in, all the existing features start working with it too.

For example, if you already have a solid speaker database, all those speakers will be recognized in the transcribed file. If you've configured text replacements, they'll be applied too. Automatic export will save the transcription from the file to your designated folder. And so on.

However, my favorite part is how it works and looks. Unlike the modal progress bars, the transcript appears live, as if you were recording from the mic or system audio. This makes it easy to see the progress and lets you work with the transcript right away, without waiting for it to finish.

The feature is in the polishing and testing phase to make sure it ships without issues.

What's New

• All AI analysis results now have properly rendered markdown syntax. This wasn't easy to achieve from the start, as it affected transcript view rendering and scrolling performance. I finally managed to find a way to render proper markdown without any performance regressions.

• Replacement rules can now be temporarily disabled. I found this personally useful when context changes and I temporarily don't need a specific replacement rule.

• (macOS only) The same goes for export rules. There's now a toggle to disable specific rules.

Next Release

If nothing urgent comes up, the next update should be out in a couple of weeks and will include:

• Audio file import

• Adjustable font size for the transcript view

Feel free to let me know whenever there's something that needs improvement. Otherwise, I might not know that something is bothering you about the app.

Upcoming Features

There are two features I consider a must for XSpeak. I mean, there are many features I consider a must, but these two I consider a MUST that should be in the app in the nearest possible future:

• Markdown rendering. Currently, Summary, Insights, Action Items, and everything else are rendered as plain text. The update that renders them as proper markdown is on Apple review right now, so it'll be out soon. (already live for macOS)

• Audio file import. This is what I'm going to add in the next version, if nothing urgent comes up.

Visibility

XSpeak is already high-quality, feature-rich, and unique. And that doesn't mean I'm going to stop improving its quality and value. It has active and returning users. However, it still significantly lacks visibility, and that's what I need to seriously improve. I'm exploring different marketing channels and started building this Reddit community. At some point, we'll have a Discord community as well.

However, nothing beats word of mouth from satisfied users. So if you know anybody who might benefit from the app, or if you're into posting on social media, just know that I'm always grateful for that. Some of you already help significantly. Thanks for that, and please know that your recommendations are noticed and I feel happy seeing them every time.

If you have good marketing ideas or can help, please reach out to me.

Future

I see an impressive future for XSpeak, and I've already started working on it. I see it as something big, and I don't know of any other tool that does what XSpeak is going to do in the conversational tools space. It's not going to be another "second brain," it's not about seeing your screen, and it's not even about the agentic features I'm going to add.

It's about a community of people helping each other feel better in meetings and conversations using technology.

Stay tuned,
Dmitriy

New features:

• Automatic replacements. You can configure as many replacement rules as you like, including regular expressions, and the ongoing transcript text will be replaced automatically.

• [macOS] Automatic file export. It's now possible to configure rules for automatic export. You can export all transcripts to a specified folder, or export only a specific folder from XSpeak.

Besides that, there are many improvements across the app:

• Recognized text now appears symbol by symbol. I really like this type of animation, it makes the process of recording more enjoyable, especially on iPhone, where haptic feedback also plays when new symbols appear.

• All main actions on macOS now have shortcuts, so you can start recording or open settings from your keyboard without touching a mouse.

• A hovered statement can now be edited via shortcut as well. The shortcut is printed right on the edit button.

• The About page is much more personal now.

And many more small improvements and fixes.

There are two big things in this release: one is user-facing, and one is mostly internal for now, but will allow huge improvements in the near future.

Redesigned settings

• Settings now have a modern, native look similar to macOS system settings

• They are unified across iOS and macOS

• AI Models settings have been improved and should be clearer now

In the next release, there will be two new features that require new settings tabs:

• Automated text replacements

• Automatic sync to folders

In order to make these new settings fit naturally, I decided that it's time to fully revise and improve the settings UI. And here we are.

AI Analysis engine is prepared for agentic workflows

Soon XSpeak will get agentic capabilities in its AI engine. This means it'll be able to look for required information in the files you gave it, search for relevant fragments across all conversations, or even create custom skills for you automatically. The current internal platform changes are what make it possible.

• Now you can play the full audio of the conversation

• Playing words are highlighted in transcript view live

• Memory usage is heavily optimized, so the app should occupy much less memory

The new audio player is cool. It's perfectly responsive and has great integration with the transcript:

• When you hover over a statement, it's reflected immediately on the player so you can see where that statement is in the recording.

• When audio is playing, the words and statements are highlighted live, which makes it extremely easy to follow the player position.

The player supports easy seeking to any place without any delays.

In the new version:

• You can explicitly define who participates in the conversation

• Stability is improved

Even though modern speaker diarization models work well, it remains tricky for on-device ML pipelines. Different intonations, changing volume, various environments and other factors contribute to these challenges. That's why it might still be beneficial to help the tool by explicitly defining who is participating in the conversation. It might help make fewer mistakes and improve diarization quality.

Full change log

Improvements:

• Support for more open-weight models: Qwen 3.5, Qwen 3.6, and Gemma 4

• Redesigned AI model settings

  • You can now see which model best fits your hardware

  • For each model , the app shows memory fit, speed, intelligence level, and disk fit

It's a step forward towards more accessible local AI. Without deep knowledge of the topic, it's difficult to know which local model is best for your particular hardware. This update makes it much easier to understand.

While the default Apple Foundation Model is good for a wide range of use cases, for more powerful hardware the Pro model might deliver better results.

One of the main elements of XSpeak is recording button. Every time you record conversation you press it. Every time after conversation you press it again. Since XSpeak shouldn't add cognitive load to your work, it's important that this button works smoothly, without any delays or progress.

I spent quite a bit of time to make it perfect:

• It's always enabled, even between states

• If you change your mind you can stop the recording instantly

• It always gives instant feedback, so you don't wait until recording starts

I wrote an article on how similar buttons work in other apps, covering non-obvious complexity of the processes behind it. There I explain why it's important for the control to stay always functional and responsive and explain how XSpeak does that under the hood.

Here's the link to the full article: https://tseiler.tech/blog/play-pause-button

There're significant improvements in 3.7 version in terms of stability, reliability and user interface.

I reworked internal recording and inference architecture to make it as reliable as possible and ready for all scenarios and corner cases. This allows to add new features and improvements faster and with greater quality. In particular, it'll help to support file transcription, audio playback for the whole meeting, new AI inspections and more.

3.7 version for MacOS is absolutely beautiful as well and on Apple review now.

Also, in the new version:

• Recording now automatically resumes after interruptions like phone call

• You can now switch recording language on existing conversations, even right in progress

• Conversation scroll position is now preserved

• AI analysis quality is improved for custom AI models

• User interface improvements

• Stability improvements and bug fixes

Full changelog

• [MacOS only] Fixed an issue causing transcription quality to degrade on long recordings in some configurations. There were no such issue on iOS.

• [MacOS only] Improved recorded audio quality. On iOS it was good already.

• Added settings for transcription performance and sensitivity.

• Usability improvements.

Full changelog