I live in a two party consent state and have yet to pull the trigger on an AI transcription service. Yogurt is the first appropriate implementation of the service in my opinion, both for personal privacy and to limit potential issues if Granola or similar service gets hacked and transcriptions go public.
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.
nonethewiser
This is totally off topic, but how do people feel about generic names like Yogurt?
I've always sort of assumed it wasnt a good idea because there is collision everywhere (SEO, registries, domain, etc).
show comments
e12e
Interesting. Maybe I can Kill one of my vibecoded atrocities now. It was born from similar frustrations - to find a good way to record audio for small meetings on a phone (there are foss options for Android - but I need one tool to recommend; https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Voice-Recorder might be one) - transcription and summation with speaker identification in correct language, support for using list of speaker and agenda to aid transcription - all done locally. Even getting the recorded audio from android to Mac - for example localsend can help).
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.
congrats! My wife showed me Granola one day and I was horrified on the privacy aspects of it. So I also built something similar but for advanced Super users - Notesy
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!
I was thinking of creating a local replacement for Wispr Flow - does this have a hotkey for speech to text?
achrono
OpenWhispr [1] is one of the earliest in this exact space, and it already supports a greater variety of models than Yogurt. Also supports meeting transcription, summarization, dictation etc. in similar ways as Yogurt.
It's a lot of fun to see what people can do with the voice transcription tools available now that are all open source.
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
I’d love to see evals for how similar this is to Granola for meeting summarisation, on the github page
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.
show comments
david_shi
Love this approach to software.
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.
Aniket-N
The electron use is giving me pause. It’s going to eat up memory.
show comments
pkb_98
Great!!!. When I stared at Granola's privacy terms, I always wanted to check out an alternative. Will check this out!
totetsu
I just took openai's example app for implementing their whisper api, and vibe coded it to support other providers endpoints, work as chrome extention, and have some file saving etc.. works just fine.
ProblemExplorer
Great job! It's refreshing to see something not limited to Macs/Apple Silicon.
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!
walthamstow
I made something like this myself but because I didn't want anyone to know I was doing it, no bot in the call, I couldn't diarise the notes. I have what's been said, but not who said it. Did you manage to solve this?
show comments
austinhutch
Great work! Personally would love the option to skip out on some of local model post processing features or optionally offload it to openrouter, the summarization steps and the ask feature eat up tons of resources.
show comments
zaius
I also got frustrated with Granola earlier this year and have been building my replacement - Noted: https://takenoted.com/
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.
show comments
jgrodziski
I got frustrated with call note apps too, and also built my own as a native Mac app: https://retranscript.app
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.
Enable transcription and at the end summarize it, and those are your notes. Anything critical, pressing, or deserves immediate attention, you write it down. That’s it! Not sure why there are so many apps redoing it over and over again in a very similar way.
Yogurt team - congratulations on your launch. I am not throwing a wrench at you. Those are my thoughts about this category in general.
kokugle
Been waiting for this for so long. very cool product
A processed dairy product is not an alternative to a mixture of grains, nuts, and seeds. That's comparing apples to oranges. Sometimes I wish we could go back to the 60s and 70s when every program name was an acronym or a single letter.
shireboy
Just tried it on a teams call and it did great transcribing and summarizing. It didn’t pick up the other speaker’s name though. Still I’ve been wanting something like this a while
newman314
Does yogurt support proper diarization and multilingual? Can’t seem to find confirmation.
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.
show comments
mrkn1
Yapsnap runs fast on CPU and even does diarization on CPU.
Is it possible to choose which model or models are used for transcription? Are other languages, such as French, supported?
show comments
hvvivek
Gonna give this a try! I too stopped all the other subscriptions and have been looking for something that works well.
show comments
ayyagari-testre
Recently, n8n has launched Nod, which can be configured as an open-source alternative to Granola.
iamwil
Currently using OpenWhispr. What is the difference between the two?
anoojb
looks amazing! if you used AI coding agents to build this, any reason why you couldn't refactor this to use gpui or rune to still get cross platform but have better performance?
show comments
kpozin
How does this compare to OpenWhispr and similar apps?
andy_ppp
This looks absolutely incredible! Thank you!
show comments
asdfqwertzxcv
Excited to give it a whirl. Great work!
show comments
yevmiyeci
readme could use the details from this post tbh. also is the local mcp server auth’d somehow or can any local app read the transcripts?
show comments
paul_h
"Private AI meeting notes. Free and open source"
... 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.
vad_n__
Hmm... granola is usually yummy with yogurt.
show comments
BizarroLand
The name reminds me of the line in Spaceballs:
"Yogurt!? Yogurt! I hate yogurt! Even with strawberries!"
show comments
insane_dreamer
looks great! my only concern is that the others on the call don't realize that it's being recorded (which as much as I'm not a fan of Google's offering, at least it does ensure everyone knows the call is being recorded)
I’ll add it to my open-source directory[0].
How does it differ from Muesli[1] and OpenOats[2]?
0. https://opensource.builders/alternatives/granola
1. https://github.com/pHequals7/muesli
2. https://github.com/yazinsai/OpenOats
Granola, Yogurt... I present Biscotti, yet another OSS meeting recorder. 100% local. Mine is MacOS native UI, no Electron/Tauri.
https://github.com/scosman/Biscotti
I live in a two party consent state and have yet to pull the trigger on an AI transcription service. Yogurt is the first appropriate implementation of the service in my opinion, both for personal privacy and to limit potential issues if Granola or similar service gets hacked and transcriptions go public.
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.
This is totally off topic, but how do people feel about generic names like Yogurt?
I've always sort of assumed it wasnt a good idea because there is collision everywhere (SEO, registries, domain, etc).
Interesting. Maybe I can Kill one of my vibecoded atrocities now. It was born from similar frustrations - to find a good way to record audio for small meetings on a phone (there are foss options for Android - but I need one tool to recommend; https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Voice-Recorder might be one) - transcription and summation with speaker identification in correct language, support for using list of speaker and agenda to aid transcription - all done locally. Even getting the recorded audio from android to Mac - for example localsend can help).
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:
https://hypertekst.net/steno/
congrats! My wife showed me Granola one day and I was horrified on the privacy aspects of it. So I also built something similar but for advanced Super users - Notesy
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/
Thanks for building!
I was thinking of creating a local replacement for Wispr Flow - does this have a hotkey for speech to text?
OpenWhispr [1] is one of the earliest in this exact space, and it already supports a greater variety of models than Yogurt. Also supports meeting transcription, summarization, dictation etc. in similar ways as Yogurt.
So, why Yogurt?
1: https://github.com/OpenWhispr/openwhispr
It's a lot of fun to see what people can do with the voice transcription tools available now that are all open source.
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
Google also has a (beta) solution for this.
https://developers.google.com/edge/foresight
It's free and uses local models.
I’d love to see evals for how similar this is to Granola for meeting summarisation, on the github page
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.
Love this approach to software.
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.
The electron use is giving me pause. It’s going to eat up memory.
Great!!!. When I stared at Granola's privacy terms, I always wanted to check out an alternative. Will check this out!
I just took openai's example app for implementing their whisper api, and vibe coded it to support other providers endpoints, work as chrome extention, and have some file saving etc.. works just fine.
Great job! It's refreshing to see something not limited to Macs/Apple Silicon.
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!
I made something like this myself but because I didn't want anyone to know I was doing it, no bot in the call, I couldn't diarise the notes. I have what's been said, but not who said it. Did you manage to solve this?
Great work! Personally would love the option to skip out on some of local model post processing features or optionally offload it to openrouter, the summarization steps and the ask feature eat up tons of resources.
I also got frustrated with Granola earlier this year and have been building my replacement - Noted: https://takenoted.com/
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 got frustrated with call note apps too, and also built my own as a native Mac app: https://retranscript.app
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.
> "Backed by Y Combinator"
How exactly?
Edit: Ah I see the parent company - https://frigade.com/
Enable transcription and at the end summarize it, and those are your notes. Anything critical, pressing, or deserves immediate attention, you write it down. That’s it! Not sure why there are so many apps redoing it over and over again in a very similar way.
Yogurt team - congratulations on your launch. I am not throwing a wrench at you. Those are my thoughts about this category in general.
Been waiting for this for so long. very cool product
I have been using Muesli for this https://github.com/Muesli-HQ/muesli how does it compare?
A processed dairy product is not an alternative to a mixture of grains, nuts, and seeds. That's comparing apples to oranges. Sometimes I wish we could go back to the 60s and 70s when every program name was an acronym or a single letter.
Just tried it on a teams call and it did great transcribing and summarizing. It didn’t pick up the other speaker’s name though. Still I’ve been wanting something like this a while
Does yogurt support proper diarization and multilingual? Can’t seem to find confirmation.
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.
Yapsnap runs fast on CPU and even does diarization on CPU.
https://github.com/kouhxp/yapsnap
My company uses https://github.com/itskhalil/talky
Is it possible to choose which model or models are used for transcription? Are other languages, such as French, supported?
Gonna give this a try! I too stopped all the other subscriptions and have been looking for something that works well.
Recently, n8n has launched Nod, which can be configured as an open-source alternative to Granola.
Currently using OpenWhispr. What is the difference between the two?
looks amazing! if you used AI coding agents to build this, any reason why you couldn't refactor this to use gpui or rune to still get cross platform but have better performance?
How does this compare to OpenWhispr and similar apps?
This looks absolutely incredible! Thank you!
Excited to give it a whirl. Great work!
readme could use the details from this post tbh. also is the local mcp server auth’d somehow or can any local app read the transcripts?
"Private AI meeting notes. Free and open source"
... 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.
Hmm... granola is usually yummy with yogurt.
The name reminds me of the line in Spaceballs:
"Yogurt!? Yogurt! I hate yogurt! Even with strawberries!"
looks great! my only concern is that the others on the call don't realize that it's being recorded (which as much as I'm not a fan of Google's offering, at least it does ensure everyone knows the call is being recorded)
Love the name