Introducing Phon 4.0

[Yvan Rose]

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

[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

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[Yvan Rose]

Cheers, Babs!

20 years of progress, lots of innovation, all this thanks to people like you who have actively contributed to this project -- thank you!

Also extending my thanks to all of you who so nicely reacted, publicly or privately, to our updates about Phon 4!

All the best,

Yvan

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/phon/CAFzNwxVEeOXv8o6mZzw%3DH__Nboyj31jnEYDu-FKcoHnUj4fgyw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Kathryn Daniels]

Hi Fellow PHON Users

It's so exciting to know the upgrade is ready, just as I have come back to needing PHON. Thanks Yvan and team!

Is anyone else having trouble downloading the Windows file? Microsoft is blocking me from the file, saying "PHON-windows 64_0_0.exe is not a commonly downloaded file" and we should decide if we trust it. I've reported it as "safe" on the microsoft link, and the response is basically "thanks" with no further steps that I can see.  The Mac version is fine, but most of my PHON3 files are on microsoft.

Help appreciated!

On Sun, 6 Sept 2026 at 07:24, 'Lise Menn' via Info-CHILDES <info-c...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Congratulations, Yvan! 

Wish I had enough hearing left to use it!

Lise

Lise Menn

Professor Emerita, Linguistics

Fellow, Institute for Cognitive Science

University of Colorado, Boulder

Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science

Fellow, Linguistic Society of America

From: info-c...@googlegroups.com <info-c...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Yvan Rose <yvan...@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, September 3, 2026 at 5:58 AM
To: ph...@googlegroups.com <ph...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: info-c...@googlegroups.com <info-c...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Introducing Phon 4.0

[External email - use caution]

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Kathryn Daniels

Speech Pathologist, B Sp Thy, MSPA

0401538807

Please respect other peoples privacy. If you are not the intended recipient of this email, please notify me by return email, and delete. Thank you

[Yvan Rose]

Hello Kathryn, everyone,

Thank you for your email. The issue you are describing is specific to Windows, which we will address as soon as we can. For the time being, this requires nothing more than your confirmation that Phon is safe. From there everything should work as normal. 

Please let us know if you have further questions about this -- or anything else with Phon 4 :) 

Cheers,

Yvan

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/phon/CABqgNZOUVpWJk8OfRryw1rzr-tcr0xOj2P0ce9HxZh93Xm2how%40mail.gmail.com.

[Yvan Rose]

My thanks to you as well, Lise. 

You've inspired a large bunch of us to carry on with the work -- and we will!

Cheers,

Yvan

On Sep 5, 2026, at 6:54 PM, 'Lise Menn' via Info-CHILDES <info-c...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Congratulations, Yvan! 

Wish I had enough hearing left to use it!

Lise

Lise Menn

Professor Emerita, Linguistics

Fellow, Institute for Cognitive Science

University of Colorado, Boulder

Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science

Fellow, Linguistic Society of America

From: info-c...@googlegroups.com <info-c...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Yvan Rose <yvan...@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, September 3, 2026 at 5:58 AM
To: ph...@googlegroups.com <ph...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: info-c...@googlegroups.com <info-c...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Introducing Phon 4.0

[External email - use caution]

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We encourage publishing through Language Development Research (https://lps.library.cmu.edu/LDR/)
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