Ask HN: Best meeting transcription daemon for macOS?

5 points by tomelliot 36 days ago | 8 comments

Granola are cracking down on their auth and I can no longer pull my meeting notes out and put them in Obsidian (my plugin is gonna have to be deprecated: https://github.com/tomelliot/obsidian-granola-sync/).

That means I'm gonna need a different meeting transcription/summary pipeline. There's a cambrian explosion of meeting transcription tools (https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Show+HN%3A+transcription). It's awesome.

I've tried some, but haven't found one that works how I want. Can you help me find one that suits my use case?

- daemon runs in the background

- uses local models for transcription, diarization/speaker identification

- primary interface is CLI/no UI. It should just happen in the background.

- GUI is secondary. Maybe a button in the menu bar for starting/stopping a meeting

optional/secondary

- pulls in calendar info for titling and attendees

- cleans the transcript

- generates summary

marshalla 31 days ago |

I'm building one that finally seems to be reasonably stable https://mimicscribe.app/.

Speaker identification is a huge trick to do on device. I've masked by sentence and capture embeddings within that mask to get things more accurate.

If you try it that would be super cool and it's basically free rn while I figure out how to market.

I'm testing obsidian integration rn. It's currently available through mcp but that kind of defeats the offline transcription thing

tomelliot 23 days ago | |

I ended up building my own take that doesn't have an annoying UI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091894

marshalla 22 days ago | | |

lol fair that's very dev of you. The next gen of models will prob one shot my app anyway.

I like the idea of having a completely headless auto recording system. I was against it initially over privacy concerns but with completely on-device its a better idea. I might snag the concept

runjake 35 days ago |

I don't know if it meets your needs, but I use MacWhisper (Pro) for this. I was an early Pro user so I think I only paid $5 at the time.

https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

https://www.macwhisper.com/

tomelliot 35 days ago | |

thanks - I've also bought macwhisper. I'm looking for less GUI and more daemon (also it's been super buggy - hopefully their recent update helps)

schappim 35 days ago | | |

I found MacWhisper to be great. I built and used my own solution for a couple of years before settling on MacWhisper.

I’ve also encountered some bugs. While debugging, I found that many stem from Apple’s platform itself (not MacWhisper) particularly around Metal and arbitrary object resource limits.

I can always feel hte MacWhisper bugs about to come on when you start to see little glitches like document icon previews in the Dock not rendering or screenshot utility not rendering the screenshot preview, brief flashes of magenta or green when resizing windows.