Phona 1.7.0

The right Option key dictates and corrects with a cloud model, claude sonnet-5 by default. The left Option key is untouched and stays entirely local.

It is a second key rather than a setting because the two differ in where the text goes, and that is a decision per sentence. A setting is something you forget you turned on.

	Grammar pass	Typical time	Leaves your Mac
left Option	Qwen3-4B, on your Mac	2 to 5 s	no
right Option	Claude, Codex or Gemini	7 to 20 s	the transcript, as text

Your voice never leaves your Mac on either key. Speech to text is local in both cases and no audio is uploaded. What the right key sends is the transcript, as text, to whichever agent CLI you have signed in, so no API key is stored. history.jsonl records mode and backend for every dictation, so the record shows where each one went.

The cloud correction is checked by the same guard as the local one, and a result the guard refuses falls back to the local correction rather than to the raw transcript. The right key is never worse than the left one, only slower.

Configure it with cloud_backend, cloud_model and cloud_timeout in ~/.local/share/phona/config.json.

Also in this release

Three guard rules changed, measured over the 2038 dictations on record. Two were tuned against the 4B model and were rejecting good cloud corrections, which took the accept rate from 0 of 4 to 4 of 4 once fixed. The third closes a hole that let a deleted sentence score 1, because a five character prefix matched understand to underlying.

The slow-dictation notice knows which key you pressed. It fired at 8 seconds and called the wait unusual, which is false of every cloud correction.

Needs an Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 14 or later, and about 6.5 GB of disk for the models.