[HN Gopher] Show HN: Mikey - No bot meeting notetaker for Windows
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Show HN: Mikey - No bot meeting notetaker for Windows
Author : hotrod46
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-02-12 09:17 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| dmantis wrote:
| Looks cool. Is it possible to use a local model (like whisper) to
| avoid leaking conversations to the cloud-based AI?
| hotrod46 wrote:
| That's what's planned next :)
| alkonaut wrote:
| Something I find annoying with automatic transcriptions and
| summaries, like the one built into Teams, is that they lack the
| context necessary to properly interpret what's being said.
| Example if I have a meeting discussing products, abbreviations or
| systems with "internal" names then it can't discern them or
| statistically rejects them, replacing them with its best guess
| for a dictionary word instead. So say we have a long call
| involving frequent mentions about a measure called pNet
| pronounced in the meeting "Peenet". Then you end up with a
| transcription of a bunch of guys having a discussion about
| penises. Hilarious, the first few times. OK always hilarious, but
| not so useful.
|
| Being able to set the system prompt for these transcriptions
| would be very useful. Like "You are a friendly bot transcribing
| meetings at a software company. Some common terms and
| abbreviations you'll encounter are...".
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This should be trivially solveable with a glossary as context,
| as you suggest. I bet the above repo would love a PR, too!
| sesm wrote:
| But the error happens in 'audio to text' part, so text prompt
| won't solve it. The way to fix it is probably fine-tuning the
| underlying audio to text model.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Doing audio-to-text requires having a statistical model for
| what word or phrase a piece of sound is most likely to be.
| Without context, you can't do better than ranking the most
| likely candidates where a common word is more likely than
| an uncommon one. Having a task-specific dictionary at that
| point would help.
|
| One could also imagine doing it at the summary step where
| the AI could simply be asked to do phonetic analysis. "Here
| is a transcription of a meeting. Here is a list of
| terms/names/participants etc. Given the transcription, the
| meeting context/topics and assuming the transcriptor has
| made errors, replace similarly sounding words and terms
| with more likely ones from the context"
| _joel wrote:
| My favourite was Kubernetes in our meeting being referred to as
| Cuban Eighties. [?]
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Perhaps these will be flagged for the CIA or DEA to
| investigate due to illegal importation of Cubans from the
| enemy!
| thih9 wrote:
| Anecdotally, if you have an accent and want to reference
| Maltese Falcon[1], your voice recognition software may
| understand it as "Maltese f* off".
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon_(1941
| _fil...
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| Gong has such a feature. It'll even expand out acronyms the
| first time they show up in the transcript.
| oersted wrote:
| There's still a surprising lack of good video call recording
| services that can be controlled programmatically, unlike the end-
| to-end SaaS apps like Read.ai or Otter.ai.
|
| The only open-source one I could find is Amurex, which looks
| promising. But it only supports Google Meet for now, it does it a
| bit differently with a Chrome extension, and it is generally
| rather immature, but I do wish them the best.
|
| The only API services available are Recall.ai and MeetingBaaS,
| they both support the big three (Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and
| Zoom), but they are rather expensive at $0.5 - $1 per hour. The
| Calendar Syncing feature is also locked behind enterprise tiers
| with additional monthly fees in the hundreds, and it is rather
| important real-world use.
| jtswole wrote:
| Hey there
|
| The creator of Amurex here. Thank you for the kind words :D
| More platform support is coming very soon ;) (read next week)
|
| > The only API services available are Recall.ai and
| MeetingBaaS, they both support the big three (Google Meet,
| Microsoft Teams and Zoom), but they are rather expensive at
| $0.5 - $1 per hour.
|
| seems like someone has told you our internal roadmap xD but I
| am glad to see we are on the right track to solve the problem
| :D
| oersted wrote:
| You are doing great work, and I do think making it open-
| source is a smart strategic choice. There's still so much
| potential for building AI intelligence products on top of
| video call recordings, and right now you are offering the
| only practical foundation to build such systems on.
|
| I've been keeping a close eye because $1/h is unsustainable
| for what we are building, and there's no good reason why it
| should cost so much. It's manageable for early traction, but
| soon we'll need to consider either to build all those
| integrations ourselves or to build on top of Amurex. We might
| be contributing soon.
|
| I did see in GitHub that Teams support was almost done,
| exciting! Do you plan to continue with the browser extension
| model, or are you also looking for solutions to record
| meetings that happen in the Teams/Zoom native client?
|
| I think this is why most companies do it by creating a bot
| that joins the meeting, it's also great free advertising for
| them. Of course it's a bit awkward for the user, but it's
| becoming a normal thing, and ethically it's better to be
| explicit about the fact you are recording.
| sirjaz wrote:
| Looks awesome, love that it is a local native app
| ForHackernews wrote:
| >transcribing it using the Groq API
|
| It's not really local: it sends all the audio to some cloud AI
| API.
| troyvit wrote:
| I'm not familiar with Groq, but it looks like:
|
| https://sdk.vercel.ai/providers/ai-sdk-providers/groq
|
| Some open models support it. It seems in theory that you
| could use your own cloud AI then right?
| ttul wrote:
| Has anyone done this on the Mac? I hate sending audio to Otter;
| it creeps me out.
| doug_life wrote:
| https://speechpulse.com does fully local audio transcription.
| The UI and settings are not the most intuitive, but it works
| fairly well and they are making constant updates.
| simplemindedbot wrote:
| Spellar.ai does a great job. There's others out there for Mac
| but I like Spellar's calendar integration.
|
| Interestingly, their initial raison d'etre was to help with
| English pronunciation and speaking speed, giving you real time
| feedback. They've downplayed this in recent releases, but the
| functionality is still there. Though, I'm a native English
| speaker and it always flagged me as pronouncing words
| incorrectly even though I've got little regional accent (I've
| been told this by others, not just my opinion. I had a speech
| therapist as a mother, hence little accent)
| simplemindedbot wrote:
| As an additional note, Spellar does let you bring your own Open
| AI key but does not allow for purely local processing. You've
| still got to send the audio out for transcription and
| interpretation.
|
| Also, I have no affiliation with Spellar, just a user.
| mpdaugherty wrote:
| We do this at quillmeetings.com - the audio stays on your
| device and is transcribed by whisper. We also do speaker
| splitting and recognition with a combination of models. If you
| share or sync notes/meetings they are e2e encrypted.
|
| FYI, the transcript-only product is free forever (it's local,
| so why not?), but generating AI notes, interpreting screenshots
| if you enable that, etc. are in the Pro plan and do require
| using a cloud API.
| bbor wrote:
| What does "no bot" mean? I don't see any elaboration, tho maybe
| I'm just blind!
| maccard wrote:
| Not affiliated, but I'd guess it doesn't have a "bot" account
| join the zoom/meets call
| hotrod46 wrote:
| The other meeting note takers usually have a bot join the meet
| to take notes, that seemed a bit strange to me.
| simplemindedbot wrote:
| There's not a "bot" that needs to attend the meeting and show
| up in the list of attendees thus giving away the recording of
| the call. Otter.ai, for instance, shows up as "Otter" (or
| another name) on a Zoom call when it is recording and taking
| notes.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Oh, so it is for more "seamlessly" helping people commit the
| crime of wiretapping in two-party consent jurisdictions, like
| California?
|
| If you don't like people knowing you are recording them, you
| probably have a consent issue.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| You could have said this exact same thing without it
| sounding like a personal attack, but you chose to be unkind
| instead. I wonder why?
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Because crime is bad and I don't have to be nice to those
| who support criminals doing crimes. If your marketing
| differentiator vs all the AI recording bot products is
| that with your product, you can record people without
| them knowing you are recording them... then your business
| model is literally to facilitate crime in many
| jurisdictions, including California.
|
| Let me be clear: if you have a bot capturing audio in a
| call you have with someone in California, and you do not
| tell that person you are recording them, then you have
| committed a felony, even if you are not in California.
|
| And what is it about you that makes you so allergic to me
| calling this out? I wonder why....
|
| See, I can do that too. How does that feel? We having a
| good conversation here?
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Thanks for your comments. I wish more people had a
| personal policy of not putting up with those who commit
| or endorse crime/fraud/bullshit. The world would be a
| better place.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| I can think of at least five reasons to use this that
| aren't illegal, including the fact that the law doesn't
| work the way this person thinks it does.
|
| The way he phrased it has turned me from someone eager to
| discuss the potential uses of this into someone unwilling
| to engage with him to discuss it any further. Even if it
| turns out that he's absolutely 100% correct (he's not)
| I'll talk to someone else about it instead.
|
| I suspect this person regularly has "conversations" where
| the other party suddenly becomes silent, and he
| misinterprets that as a "victory" instead of the other
| person deciding he isn't worth the trouble.
| free_bip wrote:
| Are you an attorney? I would be careful making such
| sweeping statements unless you are. A transcription is
| not a wiretap, it's not obvious to me that an anti-
| recording law would apply here. Plus, if you're on a call
| with coworkers, they likely already know that
| transcription is taking place, even if you don't
| explicitly say so at the start of each meeting. This is
| why you should be more kind - you might not know all
| these things.
| adewinter wrote:
| Should your concern lie with individuals transcribing their
| own conversations, or with mass surveillance and
| wiretapping actively being executed by a broad range of
| official and corporate entities without your consent?
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Woah, that's a classic logical fallacy you got there,
| buddy. I can't be upset about A because B is related and
| also bad. One of the greatest of all time ways to derail
| an argument.
|
| Shouldn't you be more concerned about starving children
| or something than my post?
|
| See how productive of a conversation we are having when
| we both use these fallacies?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Whether it is actually a crime for a person in a one-party
| consent jurisdiction recording a call with a person in a
| two-party consent jurisdiction is not a consistently
| settled issue. At least in US courts, dunno about
| elsewhere.
|
| Sometimes the courts have sided "the stricter
| jurisdiction's law applies" while other times the courts
| have sided "the law where the recording was made applies".
| The federal law is not any clearer, stating one party
| consent is the default and states can override but offering
| no further guidance. I suspect this will someday be
| addressed in the Supreme Court.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| If one state could make something illegal in the other 49
| Florida would have already made life very painful for the
| blue states.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Extraterritorial effects are usually limited in scope for
| this kind of concern. If I had to place a bet I'd say
| this is the main line of reasoning the current Supreme
| Court would use to side with the "the law where the
| recording happens" as well. I may just be advertising my
| biased though, as that's also the conclusion I think
| makes sense personally.
|
| Until that actually gets reviewed by a higher court (or
| more descript higher law comes about) what each regional
| court concludes remains the reality for cases in that
| region though.
|
| I'm not a lawyer myself, I just had to spend some time
| with the company's regarding this topic recently ("yay"
| for filling in to manage internal IT on the side).
| mijoharas wrote:
| I was looking into something like this for linux recently. Didn't
| find anything obviously simple
|
| (considered hooking up whisper.cpp and a bit of audio magic to
| make it at least transcribe, but it firstly seemed like a fair
| bit of a pain and secondly I couldn't think of a nice way to do
| speaker detection.)
| utrack wrote:
| https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX looks promising - I'm
| hacking away on an always-on transcriber for my notes for later
| search&recall. It has support for diarization (the speaker
| detection you're looking for).
|
| I'm currently hacking away on a mix of
| https://github.com/speaches-ai/speaches +
| https://github.com/ufal/whisper_streaming though - mostly
| because my laptop doesn't have a decent GPU, I stream the audio
| to a home server instead.
|
| But overall it's pretty simple to do after you wrangle the
| Python dependencies - all you need is a sink for the text files
| (for example, create a new file for every Teams meeting, but
| that's another story...)
| ewuhic wrote:
| So which are you "hacking away on" in the end?
| mijoharas wrote:
| Any good solutions for capturing the audio streams and piping
| them where they're needed? (I.e both microphone and speakers.
| I was wondering if I needed to mess with pulseaudio and/or
| jack (I mean pipewire under the hood, but I think those APIs
| sit on top and might be clearer))
| mijoharas wrote:
| Never mind, played around a little, and pulseaudio's cli
| API makes it easy enough to sling some loopback/virtual
| devices around that you can then read from easily enough.
| rs186 wrote:
| Microsoft Teams already provides similar built-in features, along
| with translation, and I have to say it is one of the rare AI
| tools from Microsoft that makes sense and actually works -- I had
| good experience using it for reviewing meetings in non English
| language. It's not hard to imagine that this will be a standard
| feature of all mainstream video conference software. Wonder what
| is the place for these tools.
| darknavi wrote:
| I've thoroughly enjoyed not having to anoint a "note taker" in
| my meetings in the last few months.
| m348e912 wrote:
| I don't think this tool can do what native AI transcription
| integrations can do, track who is speaking. Is there any novel
| way of addressing that gap?
| mpdaugherty wrote:
| We did a lot of work at https://www.quillmeetings.com to build
| a diarization & speaker recognition pipeline that works locally
| on mac and windows. Basically, we can create embeddings of
| parts of the audio, like you might create embeddings for text
| for a RAG system, and cluster them (simplifying a lot of
| details from the "last 80%" that has taken a lot of effort to
| get working...)
|
| The speaker recognition can't be as perfect as listening to
| each stream separately like Zoom itself can do, but it also
| learns your contacts over time and can recognize voices for ad-
| hoc in-person meetings, etc. which I've found really magical
| since we launched it.
| prollyjethi wrote:
| not open source :/
| jtswole wrote:
| Ah yes, a locally-run, mostly-accurate speaker recognition
| pipeline that isn't open source. Love to see cool features
| locked away while the rest of us plebs make do with whatever
| scraps the OSS world has managed to build. But hey, at least
| it kind of works, so you can enjoy your slightly-wrong
| diarization in private.
|
| Truly the future of meetings.
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