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Phonon 1.0

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@Infatoshi Infatoshi released this 05 Nov 02:23
· 77 commits to main since this release
v1.0.0
0b3fb57

Phonon 1.0 (macOS)

Phonon writes what you meant to type, in the style of the app you are typing into, and now shows it while you talk.

What's new

  • Live text. While you hold the key, a card above the capsule shows the corrected text so far, with the words just heard after it. It changes only while you are speaking, and words more than about a dozen back stay put until you let go. Releasing the key pastes the final text. On by default; turn it off in Settings. It needs streaming correction, which runs on Macs with 16 GB of memory or more.
  • Long dictations stay fast. Past about 200 words, Phonon corrects the older sentences once and keeps them, and only the newest words are corrected again at key up. A 6-minute dictation replayed through the engine came back 0.2 s after key up instead of 7.6 s, with fewer filler words left in.
  • A new main window: Home (your average speed and your last dictations, each with what you said and what Phonon wrote), Notes (meeting recordings), Insights, Dictionary, Macros, and a simpler Settings.
  • Nothing gets lost. If nothing can take the text (the desktop, a window without a text field), Phonon does not paste into the void: it keeps the text on a card with a big Copy button, and it is on your clipboard too. The same card tells you when the mic sends only silence, when nothing was heard, and when macOS has not allowed Phonon to paste.
  • Clipboard choice. Phonon can leave the dictation on the clipboard (as before) or put back what you had copied. First run asks; Settings > Dictation changes it.
  • A new correction model. It removes filler and false starts. When you correct yourself mid-sentence ("tuesday, actually no, thursday"), it keeps only the final version about half the time (0.48 to 0.58 on a 96-item test, depending on the mode); 0.2.3 kept both versions every time. It is fine-tuned from LFM3-1.7B with no personal dictations; the model card on Hugging Face lists the training data and every number.
  • Dictionary terms hold. A one-word term from your dictionary that you said is kept when the model would swap it for a different term (it wrote "MTK" for "MTP" in a long dictation).
  • Writing modes follow the app:
    • casual in personal chat (Discord, Messages, WhatsApp): lowercase, no final period;
    • formal in email and work chat (Slack, Teams, Google Chat); in email a dictated greeting and sign-off go on their own lines;
    • prompt in AI assistants, terminals and code editors;
    • minimal everywhere else.
      In a browser the site decides, so Gmail is email and claude.ai is prompt.
  • Your dictionary now steers speech recognition itself. Parakeet is biased toward your terms while it decodes, so jargon comes out spelled your way before the correction model sees it. Ordinary English words in the dictionary are left out, because boosting them could only insert them where they were not said.
  • Phonon tells you when a newer version is out. Once a day it asks GitHub for the latest release; the request carries nothing about you or your dictation. It shows one alert per version and never interrupts a dictation. Turn it off in Settings > System. This release is the first with the check, so it starts working with the next release.
  • Quiet dictations no longer vanish. A loudness check used to throw away clips it judged silent, and it caught some softly spoken sentences. Now speech recognition gets the final say: three words or more always go through.
  • Recordings keep the whole dictation (up to 20 minutes); before, only the last 2 minutes were saved.
  • Updating downloads the new correction model, about 2.1 GB (its GGUF and its MLX fallback). Parakeet is unchanged.

Known issues

  • About half of self-corrections are still missed. When the model misses one, it may leave the sentence as you said it, filler included.
  • Words the speech model mishears as a different real word (for example "Quinn" for "Qwen") are not always fixed; add a spoken form to the dictionary entry.
  • Connecting or disconnecting Bluetooth headphones (for example AirPods) while Phonon is idle can crash it. Reopen Phonon.
  • Tested on M4 and M4 Max. M1 to M3 have not been tested on hardware yet; if the Metal engine fails its 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).

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).

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