Cue 1.5.21 adds a new on-device voice model for English, and fixes a freeze that hit people who keep their notes in iCloud Drive.
Parakeet Unified English
Parakeet Unified English is a new voice model from NVIDIA. It runs on your Mac's Neural Engine, so your voice stays on the Mac. It types as you speak and writes its own punctuation.
We ran it on 318 real dictations next to two models Cue already had. It got 7.4% of words wrong. Nemotron 3.5 English got 8.4% wrong and Parakeet V3 got 7.6% wrong. It also ends sentences with a period, which Nemotron English never does, and it types far fewer "um"s. The wait after you stop talking is the same.
Pick it on the Models page under NVIDIA.
If you are new, on an Apple Silicon Mac, and choose English during setup, you now get this model first. If you already chose a model, Cue keeps your choice. Intel Macs and every other language are unchanged.
No more iCloud freezes
If your Cue folder lives in iCloud Drive and "Optimize Mac Storage" is on, macOS can keep only a placeholder of a note on your Mac. Reading that note means waiting for it to download.
Cue used to read every note on the same thread that draws its windows. With about a thousand such notes, the app froze for over an hour.
Notes are now read in the background. Cue also asks iCloud for all the missing files at once, so they download side by side instead of one after another.
Loading, not missing
While notes are still arriving, the sidebar, All notes and Meetings say "Loading notes…" instead of "No notes yet". Your notes were never gone. Cue just said so too early.