Every Ploca release, newest first, with the notes the app showed when it updated.
Ploca 0.2.1
A small update to 0.2.0. If you already have 0.2.0, the voice model does not download again.
New
When Fn is your dictation key and your Mac’s Globe key is also set to do something, Settings, General now says so, with a button that opens Keyboard settings.
Changed
Settings opens in a larger window, the same size as Setup. In Dark Mode, the selected tab’s name is now white, so it is easier to read.
Language now has two choices, English and Indian. Indian includes Hinglish and Tanglish, and if you used either, Ploca moves you to Indian when you update.
Fixed
In Continuous mode, Return and Escape now act on your dictation only in the app you started in. In any other app they work as usual.
In Continuous mode, switching to another app while Ploca is still writing no longer stops the text from reaching the app you started in.
In Setup, the Open System Settings button on the Permissions step now stays inside the window at larger text sizes.
If you are updating from 0.1.10
Since 0.2.0, Ploca is a new app, written from scratch in Swift for macOS 26. It replaces 0.1.10 in place and keeps your settings, vocabulary, snippets and licence.
On first launch, Ploca copies your settings, vocabulary, snippets, licence key, trial dates and usage stats from 0.1.10, once. It never changes 0.1.10’s files.
Ploca downloads its voice model once more after the update, because the new engine uses a different format: about 0.5 GB for Speed, up to about 3 GB for Accuracy and Indian. Dictation starts when the download finishes, and the menu shows its progress.
Microphone and Accessibility should carry over. If macOS asks again, grant them once.
0.1.10’s files are left as they were, so reinstalling 0.1.10 still works, with your data as it was before this update.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.2.0
Ploca 0.2.0 is a new app, written from scratch in Swift for macOS 26. It replaces 0.1.10 in place and keeps your settings, vocabulary, snippets and licence.
When you update
On first launch, Ploca copies your settings, vocabulary, snippets, licence key, trial dates and usage stats from 0.1.10, once. It never changes 0.1.10’s files.
Ploca downloads its voice model once more after the update, because the new engine uses a different format: about 0.5 GB for Speed, up to about 3 GB for Accuracy and the Indian modes. Dictation starts when the download finishes, and the menu shows its progress.
Microphone and Accessibility should carry over. If macOS asks again, grant them once.
0.1.10’s files are left as they were, so reinstalling 0.1.10 still works, with your data as it was before this update.
New
Spoken emoji: say a name and then “emoji”, such as “fire emoji”, and Ploca types 🔥. It works in Clean and is on by default.
Press Esc while you hold your key to cancel. Nothing is typed.
Accuracy and the Indian modes no longer hallucinate a stray “Thank you.” when you hold the key without speaking.
In English Accuracy, near-silence no longer types text in another script.
In Speed, “macOS fourteen point five” now types “macOS 14.5”, and “version one dot twelve” types “version 1.12”.
Left ⌥ is a new choice of dictation key, and the default for new installs. Your current key stays as it is.
Setup now tests your microphone at the Permissions step and tells you if it hears nothing.
Setup shows a new “Your engine, arrived.” screen when the voice model has finished downloading.
Ploca now records through macOS’s own audio system instead of a third-party audio library.
The app icon follows macOS’s Dark, Clear and Tinted icon styles.
Monthly licence keys from ploca.app work in Ploca.
Settings, About has a “Check it yourself” link to ploca.app/privacy, which shows how to watch what Ploca sends.
Settings, Licence has a link to look up your key if you can’t find the purchase email.
Changed
In Messages, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord and Telegram, a Clean dictation no longer ends with a period. Periods between sentences stay. Turn this off in Settings, General.
Settings has a new design, with its tabs along the top and standard Mac controls.
The Speed download is about 0.5 GB, down from about 2.3 GB. It is the same Parakeet model.
Ploca itself is a much smaller download, about 26 MB.
Requirements
macOS 26 or later, on Apple Silicon.
16 GB of memory recommended. With less, Accuracy and the Indian modes use a smaller Whisper model.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.10
Switching off your Bluetooth headset no longer leaves ploca deaf. Until now, every dictation after that recorded silence until you quit and reopened the app. Now the next dictation uses whatever input your Mac has switched to, usually the built-in microphone. If a microphone keeps sending nothing but silence, ploca says "No audio from" with the device name instead of quietly dropping what you said.
One case is still open: switching the headset off in the middle of a dictation loses the rest of that dictation. The next one works.
On headsets that are both your microphone and your speakers, such as the Sony WH-1000XM4, music stays quiet while you dictate and comes back after. Before, playback could keep going while you spoke, and the volume could stay at zero after you let go. You may hear a second of audio as dictation starts, or a short gap before playback returns.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.9
When your free trial and its three days of grace are over, ploca now stops dictating right then, even if it has been running since before. Until now the trial was only checked when the app launched, so a copy left open could keep going.
The trial is also easier to see. During grace, Settings shows a red notice on the Licence tab saying how many grace days are left, the Licence row in the sidebar turns red, and About carries the same status.
The reduced price now runs until 31 October 2026. Buying opens the checkout in your default browser and brings it to the front.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.8
Automatic updates work again. In 0.1.6 and 0.1.7 an update could download but not install, stopping with "An error occurred while launching the installer". A helper that Sparkle needs in order to run the install was missing from those two builds.
If you are on 0.1.6 or 0.1.7, install this one by hand. The broken piece sits inside the version you are running, so it cannot repair itself. Download ploca, drag it to Applications and replace the old copy. Every update after this one installs itself normally again.
If you are on 0.1.5 or earlier, nothing is wrong with your copy and this update installs the usual way.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.7
Setup now waits for you to actually speak. All three practice screens hold their button until a dictation lands, so nobody finishes setup having pressed the key once. None of them can trap you either: if nothing arrives, a line appears naming the likely cause with a way past it.
Vocabulary and snippets get a screen each. The snippet field used to be about twenty characters wide, so an ordinary email address was cut in half; it is now nearly three times wider, grows when your snippet is a paragraph, and the list scrolls once you add enough.
The engine screen says how big the download is, with the figure for your Mac rather than one number quoted at everybody, and says "Finishing up" while your Mac verifies the files instead of sitting at 100% looking stuck.
Your trial is seven days from the day you installed, and the last screen of setup says how many are left.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.6
New installs can finish setup again. On a Mac that had not downloaded the voice model before, setup could stop on the "Your engine, arriving" screen: the download ran and finished, but ploca did not notice, so the screen went on saying the download was not running and there was no way forward.
ploca now asks for the exact version of the model it is about to load, which is the version it was downloading all along. Setup carries on the moment the download finishes.
If you are reading this, your model is already on disk and was never affected. Nothing is downloaded a second time.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.5
The free trial is now seven days, with three days of grace after it ends. During those three days ploca keeps working and offers you a licence on each launch.
If you installed ploca before today, nothing you were promised is taken away: your trial runs to 30 September 2026 at the earliest, plus the three days of grace.
Settings, the menu bar notice and the setup wizard now agree with each other about how long is left and what date the trial ends. On the last free day ploca says so, instead of counting "one day left" and leaving you to guess whether today counts.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.4
Your own product's name, spelled correctly, in every mode. "Ploca" no longer mistranscribes as "Ploka" in English accuracy mode. Speed mode already handled this correctly, and accuracy mode now does too.
A brief license-server hiccup no longer permanently blocks a valid key. Only a genuine "this key does not exist" answer counts as final; anything else gets a short grace period instead of a hard lock.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.3
Dictation lands where your cursor is. In TextEdit and Xcode, dictated text was going to the end of the document instead of where you had placed the cursor. In a source file that meant a line of English at the bottom and a compiler error to chase.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.2
Buying a licence tells you what happened. Every place that opens the checkout now says so on the spot, instead of opening a browser tab and leaving you to guess whether the click landed.
A lifetime licence keeps working when the beta window closes. Licence holders were being blocked by a check meant for beta builds; that is fixed.
First launch now offers the choice up front: start the free trial, buy a lifetime licence, or paste a key you already have.
Updates are verified more strictly. ploca now requires this update feed to be cryptographically signed before it will act on anything in it.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.1
ploca is out of beta. The word is gone from the About pane, the alerts, and the download itself. Nothing about how the app works has changed in this build.
The trial and pricing copy now says one thing, simply: $29.99, once, at a reduced price until 30 September 2026.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-09-01
Ploca gets a lifetime licence, and a stuck engine now tells you what to do about it instead of stalling silently.
Free thirty day trial, then a one time purchase
Ploca now runs on a thirty day trial that starts the first time you launch it. No account, no email, nothing to sign up for. When the trial ends, a lifetime licence is $29.99, once, at a reduced price until 30 September 2026. No subscription, ever.
Settings gains a Licence tab: where your trial stands, a "Buy a lifetime licence" button that opens the checkout in your browser, and a field to paste a key once you have one.
A dead engine now tells you, and offers a way out
If the speech engine failed to load, Ploca used to strand you: every press raised a raw error, or the status bar sat on "setting up" forever. Now the status line says plainly that the engine needs attention, and the menu bar carries a "Re-download the engine" item that rebuilds it without a full reinstall.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-08-22
Lists now start with a word you say, so Ploca never has to guess.
Say "as follows" before your list. Holding the list chord tells Ploca that this dictation is a list. What it did not know was where the list actually began, so it guessed, and "I need three things, the draft, the numbers, and a title" could come back with "three things" turned into the first item. Now there is a trigger word: say "as follows" before your items, then say them with a pause between each one. "The following" and "namely" work too.
Without the trigger word, your words come through exactly as you said them. That is deliberate. A list built on a guess is worse than no list at all, so your sentence arrives untouched rather than rearranged.
A pause after the trigger word no longer leaves an empty bullet. If you paused long enough that Whisper wrote a full stop, the list used to begin with a blank item.
A one-time note about the change. If you already knew the chord, Ploca shows a short screen once explaining the trigger word. Skip it and it will not come back.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-08-18
Settings rebuilt from the ground up, dark mode, and a session that survives a broken engine.
Settings has been redesigned. Six panes in a sidebar: General, Vocabulary, Snippets, Usage, Feedback and About. Everything that was there before is still there, but you no longer hunt for it. Each language row now shows whether its voice model is already on your Mac ("Ready") or still to fetch ("Get", with the size), right where you make the choice.
Dark mode. Settings now follows your Mac's appearance, light or dark, and switches live when the system does. The setup wizard keeps its designed look in every mode.
Accuracy failing to start no longer costs you the session. If the Accuracy engine cannot be stood up when dictation begins, Ploca now falls back to the Speed engine for that session instead of leaving you with a hotkey that does nothing. Your saved preference is untouched, and Accuracy is tried again next time.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-08-16
A first run worth having, and a download that can always finish.
A download that stopped halfway can now finish. If your very first download was interrupted, by closing the lid, losing the network, or quitting, Ploca could never complete it. Every launch afterwards looked like it was checking, decided in a fraction of a second that there was nothing left to fetch, and left you with an engine that could not transcribe. The only way out was deleting a hidden cache folder by hand. Ploca now checks whether the model is actually there, not merely whether the folder exists, and an interrupted download resumes from where it stopped.
A completely new first run. The setup wizard has been rebuilt: a cover, seven steps, and a closing. While your engine downloads, it tells you a short history of how we came to keep our thoughts in writing, one sentence at a time, instead of showing rotating trivia. If you set Ploca up long ago and want to see it, Rerun Onboarding is in the menu.
The download screen tells you what is happening. It used to say "Starting..." whether the download had just begun, was running without a progress figure, or had died ten minutes ago. Now it says which of those is true. A download that is not running says so and offers to start again, as often as you need, rather than offering once and then going quiet.
Drawn-out hesitations are removed too. "Um" was cleaned up. "Ummm" was not, and neither was "Uhhh" or "Hmmm". A hesitation lasts as long as you hold it, so it is now recognised at any length, along with the trailing dots that Whisper writes after a held pause. The closed-mouth "mmm" is recognised now as well. Words that merely start like a hesitation are left alone: "to err is human" keeps its "err", and "5 mm wide" keeps its millimetres.
Quieter diagnostics. Ploca's own log had become mostly noise, writing two identical lines a second during a download and up to a thousand characters for every network request. It records what changed instead. Nothing about what you dictate has ever been in that file, and still is not.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-08-13
The beta now runs free until the end of 2026, and "one hundred and twenty-three" finally types 123.
The beta is extended to 31 December 2026. Earlier builds stopped working on 30 August 2026. This build moves that date to 31 December 2026, so update before the end of August and nothing interrupts you. Everything else stays the same: free, and fully private.
Numbers spoken the way most of us actually say them. Say "one hundred and twenty-three" and you used to get "100 and 23". The "and" is now understood as part of the number: "the fix for issue one hundred and twenty-three is ready" types 123, and "two hundred and fifty rupees" gives 250 rupees. Phrases where "and" joins two separate things are untouched: "the first and second items" stays words, and "sixty-eight and seventy-four" still gives 68 and 74.
A failed first download no longer strands you. If your very first launch lost the network mid-download, Ploca used to show a "setting up" pulse forever. It now retries on its own at 5, 15 and 45 seconds, and after that every press of the hotkey tries again. The moment the download completes, dictation is live.
Your clipboard is safer around dictation. In apps where Ploca pastes rather than types, it briefly borrows your clipboard and puts your previous copy back. That restore could race the paste, and in the worst case an old clipboard entry, such as a copied password, could land in your text instead of your words. The restore now waits longer, stands down if you have copied something new, and rapid back-to-back dictations can no longer resurrect an earlier transcript.
The Snippets pane now tells the truth: say a trigger phrase on its own and Ploca inserts the full text. Saying it inside a sentence does nothing, by design.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-08-05
Dictated lists stop guessing where your list begins.
Say "as follows" and Ploca knows exactly where the list starts. Until now it guessed, by looking for one of 22 words at the end of your opening line. "I need to buy the following" worked, because "following" was on that list. "Four things to do today" was not, so it cut mid-phrase and left you a heading reading "4 things to:". Now you can mark the boundary out loud. "Release checklist as follows, fix the crash, review the code, ship the build" keeps your opening line whole and bullets the rest. "The following" and "namely" work the same way, and the phrase itself is removed rather than left sitting in your heading. Lists you dictate without marking still work exactly as before.
Ploca's log no longer records a character of what you are writing. To decide whether to capitalise the first word, Ploca reads the character immediately before your cursor. It was writing that character into its diagnostic log, on every dictation. One character of whatever document you had open, in a file documented as recording lengths only. It now records the decision and never the character. Saved snippets are no longer copied into the transcript log either.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-08-03
Ploca gets smaller, and voice directives get a lot more reliable.
Refine ✨ is gone, and so is a third of the download. It needed a 4 GB language model and took 5 to 12 seconds per phrase, and almost nobody was reaching for it. Removing it took six libraries out of the app. Output styles are now Raw and Clean. If you had Refine selected, Ploca moves you to Clean on the next launch and says nothing about it.
The blob tells you when a voice directive is armed. Hold the chord and a green ring appears around the blob for as long as you are speaking. Until now the only sign was a line in the menu bar, which is not where you are looking while you dictate.
The directive chord works whichever key you press first. If you reached for the modifier before your dictation key, the chord silently did nothing and you got a paragraph instead of a list. It also occasionally fired on its own when you let the modifier go. Both are fixed.
Dictated lists survive being said in one breath. If you ran your items together without pausing, Ploca could turn your opening sentence into bullets and leave every real item stuck in the last one. It now finds the items wherever they are, and when it cannot, it hands your words back untouched rather than guessing.
"Ploca" comes out as Ploca on the speed engine. The fast English engine has no way to be taught names, so it wrote Bloca, Floca and Ploka. Those are now corrected. Real words that sound similar are deliberately left alone, so nothing you actually said gets rewritten.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-31
Reliability release. One bug, the worst one in the beta, and it turned out to be three faults stacked on top of each other.
A stuck microphone no longer forces Ploca to restart. When macOS stalled the audio device mid-dictation, Ploca's own recovery could never actually run. The stalled call left an internal lock held, and the "reset the device and carry on" path needed that same lock, so it was unreachable every single time. Restarting Ploca was the only way out. The lock is now always released, so a temporary stall clears itself and you keep dictating.
The microphone indicator turns off when it should. After a stall, Ploca's forced release of the microphone could never complete, so macOS kept showing Ploca as listening even while it sat idle. It now keeps trying for a full minute.
Finishing a dictation on a stalled device no longer hangs. Ploca used to wait for the device to hand back audio it had already collected. It now stops waiting, because there was never anything left to wait for.
If the microphone does wedge hard, Ploca will still restart itself as a last resort. The root cause sits below Ploca, inside macOS, and this release does not claim to fix it. What changed is that Ploca now survives it in the cases it can.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-28
Say a list, get a list. Plus seven fixes to how Ploca handles your files and its own settings.
Voice directives. Hold your dictation key, add the key next to it, and read a list out loud. Ploca formats it as a list instead of a run-on sentence. It understands both ways people speak lists: "milk, eggs, bread and coffee", and "Number one, book the venue. Next, send the invites. Finally, confirm the caterer." The second key is always the neighbour of the one you already dictate with, so it stays a one-handed gesture whichever key you chose.
Ploca will show you how. The first time you launch this build, a short demo introduces the gesture and lets you try it once. New users learn it during setup instead.
Your files are now private to you. Settings, vocabulary, snippets and logs were being created world-readable. Every file Ploca writes is now owner-only.
Settings survive a crash. Saves are now atomic, so a crash mid-write can no longer truncate your snippets or vocabulary. A file Ploca cannot read is kept aside rather than discarded.
The menu bar no longer says "Ready" while it is recording.
Voice directives are English-only for now.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-26
Text quality release. Four fixes to what Ploca writes, and three of them are about Ploca changing your words less, not more.
Stammered words are cleaned up. When you repeat a word mid-thought, like "until then I I just want to" or "we we we should ship it", Ploca now writes it once. It leaves deliberate repetition alone, so "that is very very good" stays exactly as you said it.
Sentences starting with "So far" are no longer broken up. Ploca used to insert a comma after any sentence that opened with "So", turning "So far so good" into "So, far so good". It now only adds the comma where it belongs, as in "So, can we start?"
Dates no longer swallow the next sentence. Saying "we launched in June, first we need onboarding fixed" used to come out as "in June, 1st we need onboarding fixed". Real dates like "June 1st" still convert normally.
No more stray space before a full stop. Trailing "um" and "uh" are removed cleanly instead of leaving a gap in front of the punctuation.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-24.1
A small fix on top of the 2026-07-24 release.
The Settings title no longer appears twice. The Settings window titlebar was showing "Ploca, Settings" doubled. It now shows a single, clean title.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-24
Reliability release. Four fixes to keep dictation responsive and fully offline.
The Fn hotkey no longer silently stops working. Under heavy load or after sleep, macOS could quietly switch off Ploca's key listener, and the Fn key would do nothing until you relaunched. Ploca now detects this and turns the listener back on by itself.
No more dropped dictation right after you finish one. There was a brief window (about a second or two) after each dictation where a quick follow-up press was ignored and that utterance was lost. You can now start the next dictation immediately.
Settings changes apply right away. Changing your mode or your filler words in Settings now takes effect on your next dictation, with no relaunch needed.
Faster, fully offline launch. Ploca now loads its speech model entirely from your Mac at startup, with no network check, exactly as promised. Startup is quicker and makes no connection.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-23
Privacy hardening release. All four changes come from a full security review of the app.
Fixed a privacy gap in the diagnostic log. When Ploca trimmed a stray "Thanks for watching" that Whisper sometimes imagines at the end of a dictation, the diagnostic log recorded the full text of that dictation. It now records only character counts, as it always should have. If you want to be thorough, you can delete the old logs: in Finder press Cmd+Shift+G, go to ~/Library/Logs/Ploca/, and delete ploca.log and ploca.previous.log. Ploca recreates them clean.
"Clear transcripts log" now clears everything. For testers using the opt-in transcript log: clearing now also removes the previous session's file, and the button only shows while there is something to clear.
Clipboard managers no longer capture your dictations. When Ploca pastes via the clipboard, it now marks the text so history tools (Maccy, Paste, Alfred, Raycast) skip it. Your own copies and clipboard history are untouched.
Speed mode now cleans up stumbles. A cut-off word you immediately restart ("re relaunched") and an accidentally doubled long word ("prioritization prioritization") are removed, with care taken never to touch real words.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-19
Dates and times you speak now come out formatted in Speed mode. Saying "four thirty p.m." types "4:30 p.m.", and "twenty second June" types "22nd June". Only real dates and times are reformatted, so ordinary words are left alone.
Faster recovery when the microphone gets stuck. If macOS hard-wedges the audio engine, Ploca now detects it on the very first press and restarts itself right away, so you get back to dictating instead of having to try a second time.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-16
Ploca recovers on its own when the mic gets stuck. If your microphone wedged (most often after a Bluetooth headset reconnect or a display switch), a press could quietly do nothing. Ploca now catches that, rebuilds the audio engine, and, if it still can't recover, restarts itself so you are never left stranded.
Numbers you speak now come out as digits in Speed mode. Saying "sixty eight" now types "68". Standalone one through nine stay as words; ten and up become numerals.
More reliable mute while dictating. Muting your system audio now works by dropping the output volume instead of the mute toggle, which quietly failed on some outputs. Your original volume is restored when you finish, even if Ploca is interrupted mid-recording.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-14
Fixed a rare crash when entering continuous mode. Tapping the hotkey and quickly adding a key to start continuous mode right after launch could, in rare cases, crash Ploca. The audio engine now handles that fast hand-off safely, so continuous mode starts cleanly every time.
As always: your voice never leaves your Mac.
Ploca 0.1.0, build 2026-07-12
The microphone now heals itself. In rare cases, macOS could wedge the audio system mid-dictation and leave the mic dead until you quit and reopened Ploca. Ploca now detects this, restarts itself, and recovers. You just keep dictating.
Fixed the stuck "listening" indicator. The status blob could freeze on "listening" after an audio glitch even though Ploca was idle. It now always reflects the real state.
Fixed a punctuation bug in Indian language mode. Long sentences could get a period jammed into the middle. Well-formed sentences now pass through untouched.