• 2 min read
Epilude ships Model 4 for private Mac dictation
Epilude says its new on-device Model 4 cuts critical dictation meaning errors by 56% while keeping processing entirely offline on Apple Silicon Macs.
Image: Hacker News
Epilude has released Model 4, the latest on-device model behind Local Mode on Mac, and the company says it is the biggest quality jump since the feature launched. The update keeps the same 1.5 GB footprint and the same speed as before, while improving how dictated speech is cleaned up into polished text — without sending anything off the device.
Local Mode runs two models directly on a Mac: a speech model that transcribes audio, and a cleanup model that rewrites that transcript into something closer to finished writing by removing filler, fixing punctuation, handling false starts, and matching the requested tone. In this release, the speech model stays the same. Model 4 is a new cleanup model, a fine-tune built on the Qwen family and trained specifically for dictation cleanup.
Epilude argues that average quality is the wrong metric for dictation. Instead, it tracks what it calls critical errors: mistakes that change the meaning of what a user said, or outputs that leak model instructions into the final text. The company says a new model cannot ship if it introduces even one new critical error versus the model it replaces.
On Epilude’s internal benchmark of 90 dictation scenarios, Model 4 passed 78, up from 69 for Model 3. Critical meaning errors fell 56 percent, dropping from 9 to 4. In a 220-input instruction-leak stress test, both models scored 0 leaks.
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The improvements were most noticeable, according to the company, in areas that often trip up dictation systems:
- Mid-sentence self-corrections
- Dates and weekdays
- Mixed-language speech
- Casual tone preservation
For example, Epilude says Model 4 now correctly turns “so um can we move the meeting from monday to actually let’s do thursday” into “Can we move the meeting to Thursday?” rather than preserving the wrong day, and keeps mixed-language phrasing intact instead of silently translating it.
Hardware requirements and availability
Local Mode works entirely offline and requires Apple Silicon Macs. Full AI cleanup needs 16 GB of memory or more. On lower-memory machines, the app still offers on-device transcription with basic formatting, with no cloud processing.
The feature is included with Epilude at no extra cost. Existing Local Mode users will be prompted to download the updated model — about 1.6 GB — after updating the app. New users can enable it under Settings → On-device models.
Epilude says Cloud mode still performs better overall on its internal tests, while Local Mode remains the option for users who prioritize privacy. The company says the next release will focus on long-input quality and deeper multilingual coverage.
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Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via Hacker News
