Phonon 0.2.0 Windows beta 1

Beta. No one has run this on real Windows hardware yet. Phonon is looking for one tester.

Continuous integration builds this executable on windows-latest and runs one
real dictation through it on every push: assets/startup.wav goes through the
real Parakeet model and the real Gemma correction model, and the run fails
unless the transcript and the correction both pass the same rules the macOS
readiness gate applies. That gate is green for this build.

The run that produced this file

raw:      "Hello Fluid Voice."
polished: "Hello Fluid Voice."
asr 2583 ms, correction 16266 ms

That correction time is a two-core shared runner. A desktop CPU should be several
times faster. Nobody has measured one.

Install

1. Download phonon-win.exe. It is one file. There is no installer.
2. Windows SmartScreen shows Windows protected your PC, because the build is
   not code signed. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
3. First run downloads 3.8 GB into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Phonon: the sherpa-onnx
   tools, the llama.cpp CPU build, Parakeet TDT 0.6b v2 as int8 ONNX, and
   Google's quantisation-aware Gemma 4 E2B q4_0 GGUF. Every file is pinned to a
   release tag or a commit and is checked against a SHA-256 built into the
   executable. The tray tooltip carries the progress.
4. Everything after that is local. No account, no cloud, no network.

Use

Hold Right Ctrl and talk. Let go and the text lands in whatever window has
focus. Double-tap Right Ctrl to latch a long dictation, then press it again to
stop. Right-click the tray icon for the menu.

Phonon swallows Right Ctrl while it runs, so Right Ctrl stops acting as a
modifier. Left Ctrl is untouched. PHONON_WIN_HOTKEY takes rightctrl,
leftctrl, rightalt, rightshift, capslock, or f13.

phonon-win.exe info      # what first run downloads, and what is installed
phonon-win.exe fetch     # download and verify, then stop
phonon-win.exe selftest  # one real pass through both models

Requirements

Windows 10 or 11, x64. Everything runs on the CPU. 16 GB of memory is
comfortable and 8 GB is the floor. About 4 GB of disk for the models.
Unpacking uses the tar that ships with Windows 10 build 17063 and later.

What is missing against macOS

Windows runs the recognise-and-correct path only. There is no microphone
priority list, no streaming preview, no screen context, no dictionary
retrieval, and no corpus. Recognition loads the encoder for every pass, so the
first word costs more than it does on the Mac.

If it breaks

Run phonon-win.exe selftest from a terminal and open an issue with what it
prints. Deleting %LOCALAPPDATA%\Phonon starts over.