Introducing Phon 4.0

[Barbara Davis]

Yvan
Congratulations on Phon4!! It is lovely to see Phon still thriving.

Best regards,
Babs

Barbara L. Davis
Houston Harte Centennial Professor Emerita of Communication
The University of Texas at Austin
Home Address
101 West 33rd Street
Austin, Texas 78705
cell 512 791-3228



On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 3:19 PM Yvan Rose <yvan.rose at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
> After several months of intensive testing and debugging, we are now happy
> to introduce the first official version of Phon 4!
>
> Phon 4 is a major update, which involved over 2.5 years of intensive
> development, bringing new and improved functions across the application,
> along with a fully revised and modernized interface. Central to the
> PhonBank project and its integration within the larger TalkBank database is
> a brand new format that brings unprecedented interoperability between Phon
> and CLAN.
>
> The most important changes from Phon 3 are:
>
>    - *Transcript-based Session Editor*: Records are now viewed and edited
>    in a single continuous transcript, similar to a CHAT transcript, instead of
>    one record at a time. Specialized views dedicated to different functions
>    dock around the transcript and can be arranged into custom layouts.
>    - *AI assistant (Schwa)*: A built-in chat assistant that can answer
>    questions from the Phon manual, inspect session data, and generate edit
>    scripts. Schwa works with cloud model providers as well as local models via
>    Ollama, and Phon can also act as an MCP server to make its tools available
>    to external AI clients.
>    - *Modernized interface*: A refreshed look with light and dark themes,
>    selectable in Preferences, and native file and system dialogs on macOS and
>    Windows.
>    - *TalkBank interoperability*: An updated session format aligned with
>    the TalkBank CHAT format, improved CHAT import and export, and a Publish
>    Project wizard for packaging a project as a TalkBank-ready archive.
>    - *Improved media and Praat workflows*: Redesigned TextGrid import and
>    export wizards, and word and phone interval tiers for working with
>    time-aligned transcription data.
>    - *Performance*: Faster loading and editing of large sessions and
>    reduced memory use.
>
>
> You can download Phon 4 at https://www.phon.ca.
>
> In parallel to all this exciting work, are currently in the process of
> updating existing PhonBank corpora to the latest format standards of
> TalkBank. We will continue to publish updated corpora through the fall
> semester.
>
> As always, none of this work would have been possible without the
> involvement of countless researchers and students from around the world, to
> whom we are immensely grateful.
>
> We also want to remind everyone about the importance of data sharing. Each
> contribution adds visibility to the researchers' own work. It also offers
> tremendous potential for additional investigations, further strengthening
> our field of research as a whole. For more info about data sharing, please
> visit https://talkbank.org/0share/contrib.html. We have tools, knowledge
> and useful tricks to share toward corpus building and data sharing, and
> look forward to working with you!
>
>
> With best regards, and wishes for a happy new semester to all!
> Yvan Rose & Gregory Hedlund, also on behalf of Brian MacWhinney
>
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