The road to v1.5

v1.5 is the biggest change to how Loka looks and feels since launch. The whole product — web, mobile web, and the iPhone app — was rebuilt around a calmer, notes-first design: a serif “My notes” home with your meetings grouped by day, a single “Ask anything” bar in place of scattered docks and menus, flat hairline surfaces instead of glass and glow, and recording that starts on one tap instead of a setup modal. Ask Loka got smarter underneath the new look — it now reasons about time, so “what did we decide last week?” narrows to last week — cross-meeting Ask and the To-Do list became free on every plan, and a long tail of upload, billing, recording, and speed fixes landed.

v1.4 graduates the best of v1.3 to every paying customer and tightens everything underneath. Ask Loka's cross-meeting memory moved from dark launch to every Pro and trial plan, per-meeting chat and PDF export ship on Basic, the default summary layout was redesigned to match the scannability of Google Meet's Gemini notes, transcript cleanup became invisible — it just arrives clean — and a hardening pass across security, accessibility, cost, and dead code shrank the codebase by over 5,000 lines.

Until now Loka stopped at the summary. v1.3 turns it into something that acts on your meetings, not just records them: one-click AI Actions that draft the follow-up email or pull out decisions and owners in a single tap, a richer post-meeting recap delivered straight to your inbox, and Ask Loka — a single assistant that answers questions across every meeting you've ever recorded, not just one at a time.

Between v1.1 and v1.3, Loka stopped treating the AI's output as the final word. v1.2 makes every meeting an editable working document: hand-edit the summary and the transcript itself, build your own templates from notes you already have, clean up rough transcripts in a tap, and share a read-only link with anyone. It also adds two-factor authentication, a custom dictionary for your brand and people's names, two new languages, and the Loka Partners affiliate program.

Two weeks after launch, v1.1 lands the changes most-requested by early customers: a refreshed pricing ladder anchored by a $1 trial, audio file uploads, browser-tab capture via a Chrome and Edge extension, a real To-Do dashboard, two new languages, a Cornell-style Study Note template, pause and resume on every device, and a meaningfully faster mobile experience.

The official launch. After four weeks of building, shipping, and refining, Loka stepped out of private preview and opened to every team that wants their meetings to do more than fill a calendar. v1.0 was the product we'd been telling ourselves about since the first commit, fast, mobile-ready, and honest about what AI can and cannot do for a conversation.

The final days before launch were spent rewriting the pricing catalog to support annual plans, enforcing a mandatory payment gate, and significantly upgrading landing page performance and SEO.

The last release before launch is the one where all the thousand small things get fixed. Safe areas, keyboard handling, iOS audio quirks, viewport math, the stuff that makes a web app feel inevitable on a phone instead of feeling like a desktop product in drag.

Two weeks out from launch, we turned our attention to the quieter parts of a SaaS product: how fast the landing page feels on a cold first visit, how we reach users between their meetings, and how we keep their data out of the wrong hands.

Real commerce meets real organization. This release introduced the pricing system that will power v1.0, the payment integration behind it, and the folder hierarchy users needed long before they admitted it.

Growing interest forced us to think about cost and capture at the same time, which produced the public waitlist landing page and an admin-controlled batching mode that trades a little latency for a dramatically lower transcription bill.

The product had been shipping under a placeholder name. This release cemented the brand we'll carry into launch, Loka, at lokanote.com, and tightened the transcription models underneath at the same time.

A four-batch audit pass through the entire product, pipeline correctness, API ownership, UI robustness, and UX polish, each surfaced a list of small sharp edges that we spent the day rounding off.

The biggest architectural shift of the build. We dropped the meeting-bot model entirely and replaced it with direct in-browser recording, real-time transcription, and a conversational AI panel that turns every meeting into a queryable document. This is where Loka started to feel like its own product.

The first version that felt like a product. Meetings were uploaded, transcribed, and returned as structured summaries, the first cut of the end-to-end loop our users still rely on today.

The foundation. A modern full-stack web architecture with per-user row-level security wired through every table from the first migration. Everything else was built on top of this.