Codex Sign-In & GPT 5.6

TL;DR: Sign in with Codex and use the new GPT 5.6 models. Computer use is dramatically faster — screen reads up to 77% quicker, and clicks/typing resolve in milliseconds instead of seconds on heavy apps like Notes and Spotify. Queue messages to steer your agent mid-task, and follow along with a cleaner grouped tool-call UI.

New Features & Enhancements

• Codex sign-in: New Codex provider integration with support for GPT 5.6 latest models
• Faster computer use: Major AppSense optimizations measured on real apps — AX screen reads up to 77% faster (Notes: 4.4s → 1.7s); element resolution for clicks and fills collapsed from 1–4+ seconds to ~1–4 ms on Spotify, Notes, and Reddit (~330–4100× faster). Plus improved app guidance and dynamic app-specific tools.
• Music app tools: Focused Spotify and Apple Music tools, plus a Deezer recipe.
• Queue messages: Send follow-up messages while the agent is still streaming to steer it mid-task.
• Grouped tool calls: Tool calls are now grouped in conversation view with cleaner summaries, attachments, and styling.
• Reasoning effort selector: Choose reasoning effort for supported models (Codex only, Alter next).
• Send shortcut: Configurable keyboard shortcut for sending messages.
• New Models: GPT 5.6 Luna & Terra

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Hub: Respects IME composition for Enter handling; fixed crash when opening QuickHub and text input undo crash.
• Ask user tool: Limited to 5 options per question.
• Audio: Fixed audio recording on input switch and a memory leak
• Search: Faster search index listing.
• Switcher: Ignores pasted switcher command tokens.

Background Computer Use

TL;DR: Until now, using AI to interact with your mac often meant pausing your own work. Not anymore. With Background Computer Use, Alter can interact with your machine and handle complex tasks in the background while you continue working on other things.

Make sure to join the Discord or Subscribe to our Youtube channel for a long form video tutorial.

New Features & Enhancements

• Background Computer Use: New tool that lets Alter operate apps in the background while you keep working — with a live preview card, dedicated agent browser with self-cleaning tabs, and optimizations for apps like Discord and Spotify.
• Ask Anything defaults: Computer use, Flow, and Ask User are now default tools for new sessions.
• Edge Bar: Inner-edge placement and updated reveal-distance logic for the activation hotspot.
• QuickHub: Now the default interface for new users; respects fullscreen position preference.
• Task sharing & export: Share task traces and export task chat as markdown.
• Transcripts: Duration shown on ready transcript task cards.
• AppSense: Re-enabled CEF and Qt access; waits for web areas before attaching.
• Scroll tool: Millisecond timing support.
• New models: GLM 5.2, Deepseek V4 Flash & Pro, Minimax M3, Cerebras Gemma 4 31B

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Translations: Added missing strings from recent releases.
• Onboarding: Restored missing grant button for automation permission.
• Edge Bar: Now displays over fullscreen apps.
• Markdown: Fixed currency rendering.

Introducing the Edge Bar

TL;DR: The Edge Bar is a slim, elegant toolbar that sits on the edge of your screen, ready to give you instant access to Alter’s most powerful features. Once invoked, you can slide it up or down to reposition the activation hotspot exactly where it feels most natural.

Paired with QuickHub, this will deprecate the notch and the old interface, including the control block taking too much estate in your menubar. The notch will stay until the EdgeBar becomes stable.

New Features & Enhancements

• Edge Bar: A slim toolbar on the edge of your screen with instant access to Alter’s most powerful features, including full menu access and a draggable activation hotspot.
• Action editor: Rename folders, collapse folders, and move actions into folders by drag and drop; cleaned up folder UI and moved create-folder out of the search field.
• Meetings: Dedicated button to quickly regenerate with another voice processor in the Transcript Hub view.
• Input area: Removed the scrollbar for a cleaner compose experience.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Hub input: Fixed Enter not sending messages, Shift+Enter accidentally sending, and Cmd+V being blocked app-wide; fixed Enter failing after deleting context items with the mouse.
• Context strip: Space key selection and Backspace to delete focused or selected context items.
• MCP: Switched to a public HTTPS redirect URI for improved compatibility.
• Transcripts: Persist “no event” to the calendar section correctly.

Focus Hotfix

TL;DR: This beta focuses on restoring reliable focus behavior across QuickHub and context controls, while tightening AppSense tab handling and fixing transcription on macOS 27 beta.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Focus reliability: Reverted an earlier hub focus restoration change and fixed context strip focus loss when deleting context items.
• Hub focus behavior: Set focus to the text input when switching tabs so Hub stays ready for immediate typing.
• AppSense tab handling: Restored support for attaching multiple tabs from the same window.
• Transcript stability: Solved an error that blocked transcription on macOS 27.

QuickHub and AppSense Hotfix

TL;DR: This beta focuses on QuickHub and AppSense reliability, with fixes for fullscreen presentation, hub focus restoration, more reliable AppSense context handling, and clearer feedback when AppSense content is unavailable.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• QuickHub fullscreen support: Fixed QuickHub presentation over full-screen Spaces.
• Hub focus reliability: Fixed hub focus on activation, restored input focus after switching, and avoided persisting blank new chat tabs.
• AppSense context stability: Fixed unwanted AppSense context deduplication, preserved AppSense content when other context is auto-added, and now shows an error when text content is unavailable because the user acted too quickly.
• Flow safety: Prevented the task tool from being used inside Flow.
• Performance: Fixed high CPU usage after wake-up caused by MCP clients looping indefinitely.

Recording and Transcription Improvements

TL;DR: @everyone We’ve rebuilt our audio capture pipeline for a crisper recording and switched to the new Soniox V5 engine for better cloud transcriptions, plus an unreleased feature sneak peek for early adopters (open the newsletter for more details).

Also check a new tutorial where Olivier shares how he creates Alter actions to orchestrate multiple tools:

New Features & Enhancements

• Audio capture pipeline: Rebuilt capture for cleaner, more reliable meeting recordings.
• Cloud transcription: Switched to the new Soniox V5 engine for improved cloud transcription quality.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Meeting history: Fix history saving of meeting recordings.
• Live transcription: Fixed a Whisper live callback deadlock that could stall transcription.
• Dictation cleanup: Ignored dictation cleanup failures so they no longer interrupt workflows.
• Startup reliability: Captured AppKit launch exceptions, removed the placeholder window, and gated hub rendering until explicitly opened.
• Preferences: Sanitized persisted layout values and resolved a runtime concurrency warning.
• Chat rendering: User raw tags now render literally in messages.
• Workspace tools: Fixed Xcode Python shim handling in bash tool execution.
• Notch input: Fixed plain Return key submission from notch input.
• Pasteboard: Fixed a crash when copying to the pasteboard.
• QuickHub shortcuts: Reduced modifier attach sensitivity when opening QuickHub.
• Hub app sense: Refresh app context when focusing the hub.

Monday Hotfix Startup Stability

TL;DR: Improve startup reliability, recording stability with third party audio tools, duplicated context cards.

New Features & Enhancements

• Microphone architecture: Replaced the audio engine with the new software mixer foundation, fixing issues with FineTune, among others.
• Action editor: Show only “Modified by me” actions in the action editor sidebar.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Startup reliability: Fix startup sequence to avoid crashes when restoring Hub or QuickHub windows after settings or data migrations.
• QuickHub lifecycle: Fix crash due caused by tool call views during computer use.
• Shortcuts: Fix crash with the “perform” tool performing keyboard shortcuts.
• Chat and context rendering: Preserved code block formatting when copying, deduplicated action attachment contexts, fixed source rendering after web search.

Action Editor and Chat Improvements

TL;DR: The Action Editor received some love with a redesigned sidebar, better search, diagnostics, and filters, while chats feel smoother with updated message rendering, reasoning display, and animated streamed responses. Plus a new video tutorial to build your personal meeting report system.

New Features & Enhancements

• Action editor: Overhauled action editor state handling, moved search into the sidebar, added row context menus, simplified built-in actions customization, added filters, diagnostics, and multi-selection.
• Chat experience: Updated message rendering with stream animations, added reasoning display.
• Ephemeral actions: Don’t clutter your chat history, there’s a “Save to History” toggle in the action editor.
• Remote MCP: Added configurable API key headers for remote MCP integrations.
• Calendar selection: Added support for selecting upcoming calendars.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• MCP and startup reliability: Bounded wake restart and tool listing loops, prevented the hub from auto-opening on launch, surfaced prepared action startup failures.
• Workspace attachments: Fix actions misfires with attachements.
• Tool calls and Quick Actions: Repaired delayed OpenAI tool results, improved recovery when automatic quick actions fail.
• Keyboard and shortcuts: Improved paste and vim sequence handling across keyboard layouts, resolved performed shortcuts by layout.
• Action editor polish: Fixed drag-and-drop context buttons in the text editor.
• QuickHub and speaker suggestions: Fixed Quick Action picker empty states, speaker suggestion editing, speaker suggestion keyboard navigation, and speaker grid column widths.
• Tasks Tool: Avoid throwing an error if a tool sent as params is not found.
• Skills and workspace initialization: Overwrote existing workspace skill folders when needed and fixed a workspace initialization crash.

Better Speakers Matching and Stability

TL;DR: Alter now improves speaker matching by letting you choose the calendars used for matching and identifying speakers from calendar contacts, while improving meeting audio recovery, the QuickHub, AppSense and tools.

New Features & Enhancements

• Speaker matching: Added calendar selection for speaker matching and support for matching speakers from calendar contacts, added manual calendar event selection.
• QuickHub shortcuts: Added a Control double-tap QuickHub shortcut, Esc no longer closes the QuickHub.
• Conversation workflows: Improved user experience when forking a conversation from a user message.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Meeting and audio recovery: Added retry recovery for audio input failures, recovered selected input authorization failures, fell back to mic-only mode when meeting audio routes fail, hardened the end-of-meeting detection.
• Speaker and transcript quality: Prevent transcripion from stalling because of bad vocabulary, improved speaker name matching, and restored live transcript context loading in QuickHub.
• QuickHub reliability: Prevented modifier-click misfires, fix background job not being in the background, close blank chat tabs on Command-W when other chats are open, and hardened QuickHub close teardown to prevent a crash when dismissing the window.
• Tools and task stability: Improved tool matching in tasks, preserved OpenAI tool-call history in BYOK scenarios, and improved skill info failure diagnostics.
• AppSense and context handling: Fixed AppSense contexts wrongly being added to messages, table formatting improvements, fixed contexts not following along when forking from the first user message.
• Voice: Display the meeting apps monitored for voice detection.

Flow finds tools again

TL;DR: This hotfix gets Flow back on track by restoring tool discovery from the tool repository, while also tightening QuickHub behavior and improving a few user-facing touches around tool visibility and QuickHub reliability.

New Features & Enhancements

• Tool visibility: Added the Ask User tool under Alter.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Flow and tool discovery: Fixed Flow failing to find enabled tools.
• QuickHub actions: Fixed shortcut-triggered actions that require input failing to start correctly.
• Hub activation: Restored QuickHub activation after a regression in beta91.
• Hub palette: Fixed the prefix used to open the palette after deleting a context card.