Phonon for Windows beta 3 and Linux preview

Phonon for Windows, beta 3, and Linux preview

Long dictations now work. Built from the same source as Phonon 1.0.1 for Mac, plus the fixes below. Correction still uses the refiner from the 1.0 release, as in beta 2.

What's fixed

• Dictations over 6 min 40 s no longer crash Phonon. The speech model accepts at most 400 seconds of audio in one pass. A longer recording made it throw, Phonon closed, and the recording was lost. Recognition now runs in passes of at most 60 seconds, each cut at the quietest moment near the end of its window. Shorter passes also drop fewer words. On a 15-minute LibriSpeech recording, word error rate was 1.35% with 60-second passes vs 2.83% with 6-minute passes. If a pass still fails, Phonon reports an error instead of closing.
• Long transcripts are corrected in chunks. Correction now works through a long transcript in groups of whole sentences that fit the model's context. Before, a 7-minute dictation lost the end of its text, and a 15-minute one was rejected outright. If correction fails, Phonon types the raw transcript instead of nothing.
• Long recordings are saved first (Windows). A recording over a minute is written to the history folder before transcription starts, so the audio survives if anything goes wrong.

Windows (beta 3)

Run Phonon-Setup-1.0.0.exe. The file still carries version 1.0.0.

Not code signed: SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC" the first time. Choose More info, then Run anyway.

Linux (preview)

sudo apt install ./phonon_1.0.1-beta3_amd64.deb

The package version is 1.0.1~beta3, so it upgrades beta 2's 1.0.0 package. Tested on Ubuntu 26.04 by installing over beta 2: public LibriSpeech recordings of 410 s and 900 s were transcribed and corrected in full (word error rate 1.64% and 1.61% after correction), where beta 2 crashed. Requirements and setup are unchanged from beta 2: Ubuntu 24.04 or later on x64, GNOME or KDE Plasma, Wayland or X11, hold Right Ctrl to dictate.

Known issues

• English only.
• Tag questions and leading answer words ("..., right?", "Yeah, ...") are often removed as filler.
• Windows: balloons do not stay in the notification center.

Checksums (sha256)

e896213818fadf5ad41106e268bb9c549f1d52fd83c92fa834c9d281a54e0c25  Phonon-Setup-1.0.0.exe
212324ad6b33af4addc790145e4a35d16a91491c875651b835d579ad941c3b0d  phonon_1.0.1-beta3_amd64.deb

License

GPL-3.0. The refiner weights are under the LFM Open License v1.0; Parakeet is CC-BY-4.0 (NVIDIA); the runtimes are sherpa-onnx (Apache-2.0) and llama.cpp (MIT).