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Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts
Congrats Recall team, I've been a customer for the past 1.5 years and the entire infra layer behind meetings has let our company really focus on "what makes our beer taste better" instead of having to worry about building universal support for different (and tedious) platforms like Teams and Zoom. Eager to give the desktop recording sdk a try soon.
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Thanks and love to hear this!
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Congrats on ur launch. Amanda has the strongest LinkedIn game I have ever seen in my life. On the other hand the product is IMHO at risk? Models like Whisper, DistilWhisper, TinyLlama, miniGPT-4, OpenHermes, Vosk, and Llama.cpp make Recall.ai meeting transcription easy to replicate. IMHO in 1 weekend you can build an open-source tech stacks that can rival or EVEN surpass the value brought....or am I tripping?
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Customer here, you're tripping. Recall provides transcription as an auxiliary service, not their core value prop.

Recall is, at its core, an API for bot recording. As someone building an application that relies heavily on conversational data, recording meetings is really important. Recall makes that process as easy as an API call, standardized across various meeting platforms. It's a huge PITA to set up infrastructure to get bots to join meetings that handle each platforms' proclivities, encoding and storing video data, etc.

The transcription service is just something they do to make transcribing recordings - one of the most common first post-processing steps for any conversational data - easier and lower friction.

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Amanda says thank you so much!

I actually agree that it’s become incredibly easy to transcribe conversations using open-source models, and that’s not where Recall adds the most value. The hard part is building the infrastructure that allows you to get real-time access to the raw audio, video, and transcript data directly from the meeting platforms. We abstract all of that away and provide you with a clean interface to access that data. Once you get the data, you could use any of the models that you mentioned to do your own transcription, or transcribe using Recall’s transcription models.

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Wow, congrats on finally using up your single Launch HN, David and Amanda! :wink:

No but seriously, y'all have built not only an incredible product that I had the chance to demo, but a great company as well, through your previous pivots and cofounder changes. You're building schlep tools that product companies _definitely_ don't want to do, years before it was clear there was a market here, and do it well.

There's definitely demand for a native screen recorder, and I think it's the right move to be agnostic to privacy (the lower down the stack you go, the more permissable you should be about use-cases). Imagine how much competition in file storage there would have been had there been an API provider for Dropbox's Finder sync technology (though you could argue it just incentivizes large companies like Hubspot to build their own screen recording feature into their platform, rather than enabling new startups like Gong but I digress).

Y'all deserve the success that you have, and wishing you all the best of luck with the new product launch!

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Thanks! Really appreciate the kind words
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Pardon my ignorance, but is recording a call without informing the other participants considered bad practice?

Congrats on the launch! :tada:

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You're right, and I agree that participants should be aware when they’re being recorded

Because consent laws are complex and vary by region and industry, we leave the consent flow to the developer and we provide the tools and guidance to do it correctly. As with our Meeting Bot API, we also urge teams to follow local laws and make recording clearly visible to users

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Thanks for the clarification.
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It's illegal in some states, legal in others.

Consult Linda Tripp

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Wish she was around!
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Also wondering this.
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Out of interest, what is the thinking behind sending a physical mailer to what feels like a large fraction of San Francisco?

Both why send it and why send it with very little info included on the page?

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Did you get one? :) This was a part of our Series B raise to help get our name out
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Congrats on the launch! I'm working on a new tool for startups sales (https://closer.so) and in many customer interviews the point of not wanting the bot in the meeting kept coming up. I love how Recall keeps brining frontier tech as APIs
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70 cents per hour is a mountain of fees... basically a $1 per meeting. Sheesh.
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$0.70/hr is our starter rate for low-volume testing. In production, developers will see higher usage and choose to commit to volume and longer-term usage. Because of this, we've seen most teams don’t pay the starter price once they scale beyond early pilots
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Is this with active speech or you pay in every second of silence too?
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Usage includes silent time too as we are still processing the media streams
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What is the value in paying this massive cost when Teams, Zoom all support ootb?
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Enabling transcription/recordings per platform and remembering to record creates user-dependent setup. Also the host often needs to install apps which adds security friction, and you still have to build/maintain separate implementations for Zoom/Meet/Teams which is often a cost that devs don't want to deal with

Instead, we built a single API that can get the same results without the issues mentioned above so you can focus on building the features your users care about

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