Updates for Praat are available from www.praat.org.

Your current version (if you are reading this from the manual inside the Praat program, rather than from the website) is 6.4.08, from April 14, 2024. Given that we tend to release new Praat versions once or twice a month, you can probably guess whether it would be worth your while to have a look at www.praat.org to see what is new, and perhaps download a new version.

Praat improves continually, and old features will almost always continue to work, so there should never be a reason to continue to work with older versions.

Why no automatic update checking?

Many apps automatically check for updates when you start them up. This means that the owners of such an app are capable of recording which users use their app when, which is information that can potentially harm your privacy, for instance when a government or legal investigation demands that the app owners provide them with access to such information. The Praat team wants to stay far away from the possibility of such situations occurring, even if you may be convinced that usage of the Praat program cannot be regarded by anybody as being anything other than perfectly innocent. For this resason, the Praat program will never contact the Praat team and, more generally, will never attempt to access the Internet by itself. For more information, see Privacy and security.