v2026.9.20

`distil-large-v3.5` is selectable on the faster-whisper lane (English only, about one WER point better than `turbo` at the same speed).

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This release covers 6 pull requests.

Highlights

distil-large-v3.5 is selectable on the faster-whisper lane (English only, about one WER point better than turbo at the same speed).
Transparent brand marks, a circular badge, and Store/MSIX logos rendered from the brand SVG.
ONNX Runtime moved to 1.30 for the CPU and CUDA lanes.
parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 stays the English default after a head-to-head with parakeet-unified-en-0.6b; the evaluation is recorded in docs/TRANSCRIPTION_PLAN.md.
The published npm latest package now carries the Python source, so npx [@arcforgelabs](https://github.com/arcforgelabs)/dictate install works on Linux on the stable channel.

distil-large-v3.5 is selectable on the faster-whisper lane (English only, about one WER point better than turbo at the same speed).
Transparent brand marks, a circular badge, and Store/MSIX logos rendered from the brand SVG.
ONNX Runtime moved to 1.30 for the CPU and CUDA lanes. The CUDA lane now uses CUDA 13 runtime wheels and needs NVIDIA driver 580 or newer; on older drivers Parakeet falls back to CPU. onnxruntime-directml is capped at 1.24.x, the last published DirectML wheel.
onnx-asr 0.12 and pyannote.audio 4.0.7.
The desktop views follow the brand-book spacing and colour rules.
parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 stays the English default after a head-to-head with parakeet-unified-en-0.6b; the evaluation is recorded in docs/TRANSCRIPTION_PLAN.md.

The published npm latest package now carries the Python source, so npx [@arcforgelabs](https://github.com/arcforgelabs)/dictate install works on Linux on the stable channel.
Documentation no longer describes the removed cloud, Pro, or API-key surfaces.

CHANGELOG/records/2026.9.20.md lists every pull request in this release once, with its related issues and thanks.