Build PowerPoints Directly in Alter

We have embedded PowerPoint capabilities directly into Alter. You can now build professional presentations, complete with custom layouts, grids, and visual assets, without ever opening Microsoft PowerPoint.

New Features & Enhancements

• Embedded PowerPoint Creation: Added a new PPTX skill so Alter can generate PowerPoint presentations directly, including support for richer visual presentation workflows.
• Media Creation: Images created by tools are now displayed in the conversation, with options to preview, open, download, and copy them.
• Custom Endpoint Management: Custom endpoints can now be sorted by visibility, and a new option lets you decide if newly discovered models should automatically be made visible.
• Tools & Workflow Upgrades: Added alarms to reminders, Apple Mail contexts now list attachments without downloading them, chat messages can be copied as plain text or markdown from the context menu.
• Broader App Compatibility: Added support for the Helium browser.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Custom Endpoints Reliability: Improved compatibility with custom endpoint setups.
• Hub & Transcript Stability: Fixed transcript opening in Hub, prevented crashes when updating transcripts in the sidebar, resolved transcript renaming sync issues, and reduced tab reload loops when many tabs open at once.
• Chat & Conversation Resilience: Improved retry behavior, surfaced connection errors more clearly, and fixed image results not appearing in conversations.
• Workspace, Tools & Sandbox Fixes: Fixed missing workspace_id in tool calls, prevented ghost tools after deleting quick actions.
• Audio, Remote & Build Fixes: Improved server error handling, fixed WhisperPro trial availability, resolved audio recording stop/write timing issues.
• Model & UI Polish: Custom models in the floating window are now sorted by name.

Review Word Docs Without Opening Word

TL;DR: Add comments, highlights, and edits directly inside .docx files from Alter, so you can review and revise Word documents without opening Microsoft Word. This release also improves meeting capture reliability, quick actions, and add GPT-5.4-mini and nano to our roster.

New Features & Enhancements

• DOCX Skill: Alter can now generate and review Word documents directly by adding comments, highlights, and edits inside .docx files without opening Word.
• Meeting & Recording Controls: Meetings can now remain active for up to 30 minutes before low-level auto-stop, new experimental method to capture system audio: choose ProcessTap to record FaceTime and WhatsApp calls.
• Workspace & Usage Improvements: Added Copy Name for workspace files and folders and fast mode cycling is less likely to switch you into the workspace unintentionally.
• New Models: Added GPT-5.4-mini and GPT-5.4-nano

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Floating Window & Memory: Removed crash-prone floating window constraints, reduced floating window crashes, and more aggressively discard conversation webviews to lower memory usage.
• Meetings, Audio & Microphone Handling: Fixed auto-meeting detection across Teams and other apps, microphone input selection shows only physical devices, and the stuck microphone “processing” indicator is resolved.
• Code Runner: Fixed various file not found errors when using skills.
• Quick Actions, Hub & Notch Reliability: Restored quick action shortcuts, prevented duplicate notch submissions, only auto-execute the first quick action response, fixed canceled retry and escape-to-stop behavior in Hub, and resolved lingering notch windows after external display disconnects.

Introducing the Excel Skill

TL;DR: Create Excel without opening Excel. Drop in PDFs, CSVs, bank statements, and other source files, then ask Alter for dashboards, analysis, and polished spreadsheets without ever touching Microsoft Excel.

New Features & Enhancements

• Excel Skill: Alter can now turn source documents and raw data into Excel files, dashboards, and analysis through a simple chat workflow.
• Voice Processing: Updated Argmax to latest version.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Transcript Recovery: Reworked transcripts to be recoverable and reindexable.
• Recording Reliability: Fixed first-recording startup issues, improved recovery from screen recording interruption, and fail fast when Whisper models cannot load.
• Audio & Dictation: Fixed voice processor selection issues, better error handling when loading transcription mdoels, enabled cloud dictation on the trial plan, and resolved dictation stop/copy-paste race conditions.
• Chat & Editor UX: Fixed long tool-call URL overflow in chat, preserved new lines when copying code blocks, and restored the missing YouTube transcript icon in the context strip.
• Navigation & Search: Improved sidebar display when not searching.

Native Web Search: The Better Way

TL;DR: Native Web Search is now built into Alter’s router models. Pick best, fair, fast, or light, and Alter automatically retrieves current information from the internet when needed with no tool setup or extra steps. Plus welcome GPT 5.4 to our model roster.

New Features & Enhancements

• Native Web Search: Added automatic backend-powered web retrieval to Alter’s router models so current information is fetched from the internet when needed.
• Workspaces: Now code runner and full-access are exclusive to avoid confusion, full rework of the sandbox system for both bash sandbox and code container, and added previews for all workspace root files.
• Meetings: Automatically copy transcripts in Markdown format with sync support.
• New Default Skills: Embedded Anthropic skill for DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX files.
• New Model: OpenAI GPT-5.4 is available to everyone.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Message Editing Reliability: Fixed floating panel editing, newline handling, deletion at the start of lines, and Escape-to-cancel behavior.
• Speech-to-prompt: Fixed continuous speech-to-prompt when an active chat is open in the hub.
• Custom Model Providers: Fixed model identifier parsing.
• Tool Use: Improved bash tool and reduced malformed tool calls

Hotfixes & Stability Improvements

TL;DR: This hotfix release focuses on reliability and polish across actions, recording, floating panel behavior, flow execution, and workspace bash support.

New Features & Enhancements

• Workspace Bash Safety: Added an allow list path to support more CLIs like Obsidian-cli
• Recording: Ignored “no capture source” errors when removing screens to avoid unnecessary failures messages.
• Floating Panel UX: Removed the large overlay in favor of a cursor-based feedback.
• Flow Execution: Optimized flow step behavior for smoother and more predictable runs.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Built-in Actions Respect Settings: Fixed built-in actions so they correctly honor user-disabled tools.
• Recording Reliability: Fixed multimonitor timeout behavior during recording.

Alter Mode

TL;DR: Alter Mode lets you create custom workspaces with dedicated tools and instructions. When you enable a mode, Alter automatically switches you to the linked workspace, giving you a controlled environment tailored to specific contexts like finance, personal, or professional workflows. Plus discover new documentation website at https://docs.alterhq.com.

New Features & Enhancements

• Alter Mode + Workspaces: Introduced custom modes with workspace-follow behavior
• Hub Productivity: Added transcript-first editing flow, multi-select delete (cmd+backspace), double-click rename in transcript view, and better sidebar render performance
• Conversation & Chat UX: Moved to a new architecture, reduced memory usage by 90%, and added command-based dragging for the floating chat window
• Database: Chats are now unencrypted for a faster experience but always live on your device.
• Flow: Better summarization step to surface links and ids likely to be used during the next turns.
• Voice & Meetings Controls: Added recording input-device selection and transcript export to a user-defined folder for meetings
• Action Editor & Scheduling: Added a new layout in the action editor, plus a schedule trigger for run actions on new transcripts
• Docs & Help Experience: Added automatic alter-docs skill updates from the public https://github.com/alterhq/docs/ repository, and launched one-click Help chat entry in the menu.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Sandbox Runtime Stability: New container with relaxed rights to install more libraries using apt-get. Better persistences of installed libraries.
• Voice & Recording Reliability: Fixed noop notifications when recordings are canceled.
• Malformed tool calls: New test suites and recovery system
• Hub Refresh & Live Updates: Fixed transcripts not appearing immediately after creation and aligned upcoming refresh behavior with other refresh controls

Introducing Plan Mode

TL;DR: We’re thrilled to introduce Plan Mode to Alter, a new approach to complex workflows that puts thinking before execution. Better planning leads to better results. Plus new models!

New Features & Enhancements

• Plan Mode: Introduced Plan Mode to help structure complex workflows by planning before execution
• Flow Engine: Add transform/chaining support between tools and a summarization step to avoid context bloat
• New Models: Added Sonnet 4.6, GLM 5, Minimax 2.5, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, and FM2-24B-A2B-Preview to the model roster
• Speech-to-Text: Voxtral 2 is now the main cloud STT processor, with Deepgram Nova kept as a fallback

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Hub Input & Navigation: Fixed hub input expansion and context strip navigation issues
• Hub UI Stability: Fixed flickering scroll with tool calls and removed transparency effects from conversation view
• Conversation & Sidebar: Fixed conversations sometimes not showing in sidebar, plus performance optimizations
• Malformed Tool Calls: Server-side fixes to avoid malformed tool calls
• Usage: Improved fair-use display behavior
• Transcript Indexing: Fixed transcripts renamed from the notch not being reindexed properly
• Menus & Action Editor: Fixed picky click hit areas in Alter menu categories and removed unwanted autofocus in action editor general pane
• Microphone Sessions: Improved recording stop flow by clearing live sessions correctly, avoiding stray sessions, removing duplicate reset handling, improving stop reactivity, and storing failed recordings in history when possible
• Microphone Errors: Better handling of session start failures
• Floating Widget: Reverted change breaking context retrieval

Hotfix Account Issues

TL;DR: This release fixes account-related issues: the subscribe reminder no longer popups for lifetime and pro users using the cloud voice processor, and the Hub correctly clips scroll content when reduced transparency is enabled.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Subscribe Reminder: Avoid showing account locked reminder when user is in lifetime or pro and using cloud voice processor
• Hub: Enable scroll clipping when reduced transparency is used in system settings

HOTFIX for beta68

TL;DR: We broke skills import and automatic inserts, couldn’t let that for a week so fixed it under 1 hour.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Skills: Fix broken import button
• Tools: Avoid adding workspace tools when no skill tools or no workspace linked
• Pasteboard: Fix weird history behavior inserting wrong text

Calling all the keyboard maestros

TL;DR: This week, we spent a significant amount of time on bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements. We are also expanding our support for keyboard shortcuts to deliver a faster, more intuitive experience with Alter. Finally, routers (Best and Light) are now available in our gateway, including the new Fair router, ahead of the Fair policy rollout.

New Features & Enhancements

• Hub Keyboard Navigation: Full keyboard support for Hub search results, workspace picker, and context strip — including multi-select with Shift+Arrow keys. Search/filter with Cmd+F everywhere, clear search with button or keypress
• Menu System: New workspace menu commands to switch workspaces, add files, and manage containers (start/stop, terminal). Single window management command group, hub menus for workspace permissions
• Hub Shortcuts: Cmd+T for new tab, Cmd+W restored for closing, icons added to hub commands. Default focus on input area when opening Hub
• Bulk Operations: Multiple selection in sidebar for deletion; bulk tagging and export from the sidebar
• Actions & Routers: Built-in actions have tools disabled by default. Alter fast and best backend routers are now available in the API gateway.
• Ephemeral Workspaces: Skills with ephemeral workspaces work without a real workspace
• Performance: Async save panels to prevent hangs, faster recording listing in notch header, lazy loading of context and tool calls. Earlier markdown content loading.
• UI Polish: Bigger sheet for managing custom models, better action form popup, more visible tab bar on light mode. Tool status moved below share overlay.
• Meetings: Mistral Voxtral is now the main cloud processor, Deepgram Nova is the backup for languages not supported by Mistral.
• New Models: Kimi K2.5 and Qwen3 Coder Next are the latest additions
• Fair Policy: New router Alter Fair policy automatically used when the fair policy budget is exhausted. Usage shown in the Billing tab.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Hub & Conversations: Fixed conversations not removed from sidebar on delete. Fixed chats not opening, restored loading indicator
• Memory & Crashes: Fixed memory leak in Artifacts and AssistantMessages; double free when deinit messages. Prevent crash when switching sections from menu bar
• Recording & Transcripts: Fixed renaming transcripts deleting them when slugs match; proper handling of failed sessions; correct session removal at end of action recording
• Pasteboard & Paste: Restore paste synchronously to avoid overwriting; restore paste behavior in Hub for files, images, etc.
• Context Strip: Fixed keyboard navigation, focus after deletion, and deletion of context
• Models & Messages: Save model in assistant message and user defaults; fix model missing in message; custom model IDs use proper format instead of Custom prefix
• Whisper: Avoid unloading model while transcription is active
• Floating Panel: Avoid small height windows
• Sandbox & Workspace: Disable sandbox for ephemeral workspaces
• Skills: Fixed parsing failures for Skill.md descriptions
• Misc: Fixed multi-select delete glitch, sidebar search, focus when cancelling search. Clear workspace search when selecting in popover. Tool status view no longer always opened on load. Better error management when chat fails to start or continue. Remove error notifications when starting live transcript