How does it differ from Muesli[1] and OpenOats[2]?
0. https://opensource.builders/alternatives/granola
That's just scratching the surface, I have never used any of these apps including others referenced in this thread.
I noticed that Muesli's star count on your list doesn't match what's in Github (~300 vs 1.6k), do those update regularly?
I appreciate that you included a default warning for the owner to let everyone on the call know they are being recorded. It might be ideal to take that a step further and have the popup occur again if another party joins the call and should also be notified of the recording.
I was thinking of creating a local replacement for Wispr Flow - does this have a hotkey for speech to text?
I didn't tackle all - but a few in a python script wrapped in cosmopolitan libc. Works on Mac, seemingly Linux (Terminal on chromeOS) - possibly windows (laptop just about back from repairs, not tested yet).
It's an experiment - source not open yet - and op is probably better.
But for the curious:
I've always sort of assumed it wasnt a good idea because there is collision everywhere (SEO, registries, domain, etc).
This supports my intuition that its not a good idea, although I suspect you meant to demonstrate something else.
Lets clarify something. Generic names aren’t inherently bad. What Im trying to evaluate is how bad it is for any given person to use a generic name for their new project. When its been used 20 times before and you aren’t going to be a billion dollar company.
Also somewhat off topic - I've been getting a ton of spam calls now that I've put my phone number on my google business profile. They are robo calls with essentially the same text: "Don't hang up" and "Please stay on the line".
My question is: Could we use these same technologies to build an app to detect certain strings and just hand up? Or on my behalf, press 1 and when the scammer - i mean operator - picks up say "Fuck off"????
So, why Yogurt?
I have been using for 6 months and just love it (and my wife moved over too!). Uses the Gemini APIs (they are so fast, so cheap and so good!). Now we actually use it within the company as well!
Rolling out wider in Testflight below.
Notesy: https://prairie-petition-enterprises-expressions.trycloudfla...
- keeps the audio file
- custom prompts to modify notes as you want
- transcripts and notes
- batches by people you have talked to
- a master task list
- Sync all files and audio and notes to Google Drive
- Shipping now with our API for testing but you can switch to your own Gemini API in settings!
Uploading the repo shortly on github by this weekend!
More on the privacy features here https://x.com/jharohit/status/2084204163416601026
Other apps we are building on similar lines of privacy and your own data and AI concept:
APP STORE: https://contrast-situated-priorities-leu.trycloudflare.com/
I'm really not trying to be a jerk here and this is very cool but I'm not sure it qualifies as privacy-friendly?
2. Yeah the biggest privacy breach is not how they can train on your data but rather the audio, the notes and knowledge graph someone like Granola can have
3. Your data is your data.
4. Also code for the app will be open source entirely shortly - so feel free to extend and add a gemma 4 or deepseek 4 flash locally. My goal was maximum freedom while also maintaining top level note quality. Gemini API satisfies both.
https://developers.google.com/edge/foresight
It's free and uses local models.
I've been building my own Jarvis, and I still haven't built my own meeting mode for him yet, though it's on the trajectory. I may borrow some ideas from this.
I really like the filter for the whispered, hallucinated words that Whisper sometimes hears, like, "Thanks for watching," when it's silent. That's cool.
I do a similar splitting of speech, but I think a slightly different mechanism. So I'll have to take a look at how well yours works.
And, I'm not checking the loudness of the mic and the computer audio to figure out when the speaker output is leaking. That's nice.
If there was anything I would add to yours, it would be diarization on the same inputs. So the room mic might have two or three people behind it, and to have diarization for that to know who is talking at any one time would be probably helpful. I use NVIDIA's Nemotron on the Mac. https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Nemotron-3-Diarization
And, I have enrollment for voices with speaker embeddings using this: https://github.com/wenet-e2e/wespeaker
It should be possible given granola stores the transcript and the summary.
Granola has been such a fantastic sticky product for me given how simple it is: guaranteed a good summary, and a MCP that is a couple of clicks to setup with Claude/ChatGPT.
It's mindboggling that in light of all the hacks people will still install keyloggers and apps that take screenshots of your desktop and upload them, especially when alternatives exist.
When starting out, did you consider:
- Handy, either forking it or adding PRs?
- If you disliked the Handy UI, what about the choice of backend? Did you look into RealtimeSTT? The author is really serious about ASR and transcription
There are a 1000 Mac ASR and transcription projects, so it's really refreshing to see something that others outside the Mac garden can use - my worry is that by not reusing more mature foundations, you end up taking too much of a burden and burn out. The non Apple Silicon space needs more projects like these!
Source code is here if you want to have an agent take a look: https://github.com/robgough/dictator/
My vibeslop tries to do it - I'm checking if I can just opene the code (it's python, so it's not exactly closed) - but even just going by the interface I think you get the idea:
It shares similar principles but is (currently) closed source and mac-only.
Take a look at anarlog as well - it's a great project and I wish I'd found it earlier as I probably would have contributed instead of starting my own: https://anarlog.so/
Let me know if you want to compare notes - I am sure we have hit a lot of the same issues.
I wanted full automation, full customisation of prompts for summary, ideas extraction, etc. and using the best speech-to-text models available (I will also add Apple's SpeechAnalyzer soon for mundane transcription where the best accuracy is not needed).
Once started, Retranscript runs on its own. It notices the call automatically, records all voices with no bot in the meeting. Everything lands as plain files in a configurable folder.
The trade-off is the reverse of Yogurt's: the audio goes to the model you chose instead of staying on your Mac. With your own keys it goes straight to the provider on openrouter, and nothing passes through my server. There's no subscription. The app is free, and you pay for the models, at the provider's price with your own key or with prepaid credits. It's closed source for now (will release as open-source in the future), and Mac-only.
Congrats on the launch, it's good to see so many people exploring this space, each with a different take on it.
How exactly?
Edit: Ah I see the parent company - https://frigade.com/
Then I realized it's the parent company which was backed in 2023, not this particular project. This is I think borderline abusing the yc name.
Yogurt team - congratulations on your launch. I am not throwing a wrench at you. Those are my thoughts about this category in general.
Also, what’s the current best STT model? Apple’s dictation model isn’t good which is one big reason why I don’t use STT much.
... for those that not initiated and don't want to be nerd sniped. I wish Hackernews allowed a concensus changing of post titles to add missing contect.
"Yogurt!? Yogurt! I hate yogurt! Even with strawberries!"
Some of the tricks that big companies use to avoid being recorded, like forcing everyone to use their MS Teams or whatever else they use of course don't work. And if you go into a situation where you might have lawyers demanding and getting access to documents, you might want to think twice about having any transcripts of certain meetings. Those could be used against you.
But on the other hand, it's very annoying to have meetings without transcripts these days. They really help staying organized if you do a lot of calls. I get involved in a lot of sales and other business calls and a lot of the prep work for those involves figuring out the basics of who am I talking to, what's our history with this contact and what did we discuss before, etc. Having full context with transcripts enables concise briefings, quick follow ups, etc.
The reality here is of course that many people are going to end up using AI to record, translate, summarize, and analyzing more or less 24x7. This is becoming so cheap and easy that there's no technical reason to go offline by default. You might still want to for very confidential meetings or personal reasons. But there are going to be lots of people around you that will make different choices.
Reflecting on my own situation, I could definitely benefit from a diligent always on note taking personal assistant that translate any off the cuff remarks, encounters, casual conversations, etc. into actionable things. A lot of that is lost in the moment with me. I'm too chaotic to do this myself. Also, I can't multi task all that well. Writing and listening at the same time is hard for me. Especially when I also am trying to participate in a meeting (which adds thinking and talking to the task load).