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Phonon 0.2.0

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@Infatoshi Infatoshi released this 30 Oct 19:53
· 58 commits to main since this release
v0.2.0
0f0e0ed

Phonon 0.2.0 (macOS)

Phonon's correction model is now one I trained myself, on public audio only. It replaces Gemma 4 E2B as the default.

What changed

  • New default correction model: Phonon refiner 1.7B, fine-tuned from LiquidAI's LFM3-1.7B. The training audio is public YouTube technical talks, transcribed by Parakeet and labeled by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash running locally. No one's personal dictations went into it. Weights: https://huggingface.co/Infatoshi/phonon-refiner-1.7b
  • Accuracy: 28-31% fewer word errors than Gemma 4 E2B on two held-out dictation sets (12.1% vs 16.9% and 10.8% vs 15.7%, measured on the shipped 4-bit model).
  • Speed: the refiner runs on Phonon's own Metal engine with a speculative drafter, bundled in the app. Key-up to text is about 0.3 s (median, dictations under 30 s) on an M4 Max and about 1.3 s on an 8 GB M1. If the engine can't start on a Mac, Phonon loads the same refiner on MLX instead and says so in the startup window.
  • Smaller first download: about 4.9 GB of weights (Parakeet 2.47 GB + refiner 2.40 GB), down from 5.6 GB, plus about 0.17 GB of Python packages. The startup window shows real download progress.
  • The engine is built for macOS 14 and later, on Apple Silicon.
  • Your dictionary still feeds the refiner on every request (the "Vocabulary the speaker may use" line).
  • Also since 0.1.7:
    • Learn from your edits: when you fix a word Phonon typed, it offers to add the word to your dictionary. Nothing is added until you approve it.
    • Private apps and sites: Phonon reads nothing in them, so no screen reading and no edit learning. Signal and Discord are on the list by default; password prompts and password managers are always private.
    • Screen context reads only the windows you can see, plus any you switch to while speaking, with on-device OCR. Screenshots are never saved.
    • Meeting notes (off by default): when a call starts in Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, Slack, Discord or a browser meeting, Phonon asks whether to record your mic and the call audio to local WAV files.
    • History shows what Phonon wrote next to what you kept.
    • Fixed a crash when a call app switched audio devices mid-session.
    • The first dictation after launch no longer waits on screen reading, and the engine warms up when you press the key.
    • Settings use plain wording, with switches that read on or off at a glance.

License

Phonon stays GPL-3.0. The refiner weights are under the LFM Open License v1.0, which allows commercial use only for organizations under $10M in annual revenue. Parakeet is CC-BY-4.0 (NVIDIA). The engine links llama.cpp (MIT, commit 39febd2 plus the patch in third_party/llama.cpp).

Install

brew install --cask infatoshi/phonon/phonon

or download Phonon.dmg below (signed and notarized). The Homebrew formula builds from source and corrects on the MLX refiner; the cask and the DMG include the native engine.

Known limits

  • The public refiner knows new technical terms less well than a refiner trained on your own dictations: on my held-out sets it got 49% of new terms right, against 89% for my personal model. Adding terms to the dictionary is the lever for now.
  • English only.
  • Windows beta is unchanged and still uses Gemma 4 E2B.
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