Skip to content

Phonon 0.2.1

Choose a tag to compare

View all tags
@Infatoshi Infatoshi released this 31 Oct 21:04
· 83 commits to main since this release
v0.2.1
d816a17

Phonon 0.2.1 (macOS)

Phonon now transcribes and corrects while you talk, so most of the work is done before you let go of the key.

What changed

  • Streaming: while you hold the key, Parakeet re-transcribes the recording every 0.4 s and the refiner corrects the transcript so far. At key release only the last few seconds are transcribed again, and the refiner checks its draft instead of starting over. On an M4 Max, the median time from key release to corrected text went from about 215 ms to about 30 ms (40 real dictations, measured inside the app's engine; pasting adds a few ms). If you pause before letting go, the last pass already heard every word: those dictations were ready in about 12 ms.
  • Same text as before: streaming gives the same transcript as transcribing the whole recording at once, within measurement noise (1,351 public clips with human transcripts: +0.0005 word error rate, 95% interval -0.0010 to +0.0019).
  • Streaming is on by default on Macs with 16 GB of memory or more and off below, where it would keep the GPU busy while you talk. "stream_refine": true or false in ~/Library/Application Support/Phonon/settings.json overrides it.
  • Speech recognition runs on Phonon's own Metal kernels instead of MLX: the same Parakeet weights, read directly from the existing download, with no new files. If the kernels can't run on a Mac, a startup self-test switches to MLX.
  • A faster drafter for the refiner (G16): when streaming is off, the correction step is about 1.2x faster (185 to 148 ms median on an M4 Max, 40 dictations), with identical output. It replaces the drafter file in the model download (about 215 MB).

Known issues

  • Connecting or disconnecting Bluetooth headphones (for example AirPods) while Phonon is idle can crash it. This also happens in 0.2.0. Reopen Phonon; a fix is in progress.
  • The Metal speech kernels are untested on base M1 and M2 chips. If they fail the startup self-test there, Phonon uses MLX as before.
  • English only.

Install

brew install --cask infatoshi/phonon/phonon

or download Phonon.dmg below (signed and notarized). Updating from 0.2.0 downloads only the new drafter file; the other weights are unchanged.

License

Phonon stays GPL-3.0. The refiner weights are under the LFM Open License v1.0. Parakeet is CC-BY-4.0 (NVIDIA). The engine links llama.cpp (MIT, commit 39febd2 plus the patch in third_party/llama.cpp).

Assets 3
Loading