Teach Alter Your Defaults

Hey everyone,

What if your AI assistant actually remembered who you are?

Not in a creepy way—in a useful way. Like knowing you're a software engineer who prefers concise technical explanations. Or that you're a product manager who needs data-driven insights. Or that you always want dark mode and bigger text.

Today, we're introducing the Manage Settings tool—the first step toward giving Alter memory.

Right now, it's proactive memory: you tell Alter about yourself, and it remembers. Soon, it'll be reactive memory: Alter will learn from your behavior automatically.

But let's start with what you can do today.

What is Manage Settings?

Manage Settings is a new Local Tool that lets you configure everything about how Alter works—through natural conversation.

No digging through preference panels. No checkboxes. Just tell Alter what you want, and it handles the rest.

You can adjust:

1. Your Profile & Persona – Tell Alter about your role, expertise, and communication preferences

2. Appearance – Font sizes, color schemes, panel position

3. AI Behavior – Temperature (creativity vs. precision), response length, language

4. Privacy & Analytics – Control data collection and screen capture visibility

5. Features – Enable or disable specific suggestion rules

Why Your Persona Matters

The most powerful setting is your persona.

Think of it as teaching Alter who you are and how you work. The more context you provide, the better every response becomes.

Example persona:

With this context, Alter knows:

• Your technical level

• Your preferred communication style

• Your domain expertise

• What kind of responses you value

Every interaction becomes more relevant, more useful, more you.

How to Get Started

1. Enable Manage Settings

1. Open Alter

2. Click the 3-dots menu → Tools Manager

3. Go to Local Tools tab

4. Select Alter in the grid

5. Find Manage Settings and click "+"

That's it. Now you can start customizing.

2. Set Your Persona

Tell Alter about yourself"Update my profile. I'm a product manager at a fintech startup. I focus on user research and roadmap prioritization. I prefer data-driven insights and concise summaries."

Or:

• "Add to my persona that I'm a technical writer who values clarity and accessibility."

Alter will remember this for every conversation.

3. Adjust Everything Else

Want dark mode? "Switch to dark mode."

Need bigger text? "Make the text bigger."

Preparing for a client call? "Enable privacy mode for my screen share."

Brainstorming session? "Increase temperature to 1.3 for more creative responses."

It all happens through conversation.

Advanced: Programmatic Profile Enhancement

Here's where it gets interesting.

You can use Manage Settings to continuously improve your Alter experience:

1. Download best practice guides (OpenAI's prompt cookbook, Anthropic's constitution, etc.)

2. Ask Alter to extract key insights and add them to your persona

3. Refine over time – Your persona becomes a living document of your expertise and preferences

Example:

"I'm uploading OpenAI's prompt engineering guide. Extract the key principles and add them to my persona."

Now every interaction is grounded in proven AI best practices and your unique context.

Try It Today

Update to the latest version, enable Manage Settings, and start teaching Alter who you are.

Hit reply and let us know what you customize first.

Cheers,

Samuel & Olivier

Full Changelog

New Features & Enhancements

• Manage Settings Tool: Read and update Alter settings from any chat window, including profile, appearance, model parameters, notifications, and analytics preferences

• Scroll Tool: Added scroll tool with improved browser compatibility

• Get Active App Context Tool: New tool to retrieve context from the currently active application

• Wait Tool: Added wait tool for timing control in tool sequences

• Login With Apple: Added "login with Apple" support with improved webview experience

• Onboarding: Brand-new onboarding experience with tutorial and improved flow

• Action-Driven Dictation Cleanup: Dictation cleanup is now driven by an Alter Action for better customization

• Audio Ducking: More sensible audio ducking during dictation to improve quality

• Audio Processors: Use different audio processors for dictation and meetings

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Race Conditions: Fixed multiple race conditions

• Crash Fixes: Resolved crashes when restoring clipboard, capturing window images, listing windows, default audio processor, recording history, and analytics capture

• Notch: More reliable notch-closing behavior, fixed focus issues after selecting a model, improved hover delay, and better handling when clicking outside

• Voice: Fixed data race on keywords flag, improved transcript indexing, better error reporting for invalid audio files and removed hesitation parts of speech in English

• Audio Recording: Fixed echo in meetings, improved handling of low audio detection, and better error reporting for empty audio files

• Conversations: Fixed concurrency issues when renaming conversations and improved context handling

• IME: Fixed cursor position issues and input method suggestions

• API & Endpoints: Better error handling for API errors with body, fixed custom endpoints for Gemini, OpenAI, and OpenRouter

• Voice Triggers: Fixed automatic context addition issue

• JXA: Fixed bad access crashes

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