Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcription tool?

As a hearing impaired software engineer, I have built my own local-first solution to transcribe entirely locally in real time word by word. It's my daily driver for transcribing meetings, interviews, etc. Because of its local-first capability, I do not have to worry about privacy concerns when transcribing meetings at work as all data stays on my machine. It's about as fast as Otter.ai although there's definitely room for improvements in terms of UX and speed. Caveat is that it only works on MacBooks with Apple silicon, fronted by a very simple TUI.

I am thinking of putting it up as an open source project on GitHub to garner interest. If interest is high, commercializing it as a product would be a next step. Before I go too deep in that direction, I'm curious about the market demand. How does the HN community think about the demand for a local-first live transcription tool?

> If interest is high, commercializing it as a product would be a next step

Why? OpenAI's Whisper is a free local model with native GUIs on most operating systems. I wrote one myself in a weekend, it's one of hundreds of similar GUIs that exist.

What functionality would you be offering that people can't otherwise get for free? This is a pretty competitive space, trying to sell a TUI is going to leave you gravely disappointed by the sales (unless it's extremely impressive).

I've tried this demo before. My solution is better in terms of latency and accuracy. You can place Otter.ai and Real-time Whisper WebGPU side by side and see the difference. That's the difference I observed with my solution as well.

This reminded me of https://github.com/usefulsensors/moonshine

Yes, my partner is hearing-impaired and I’ve been looking for a tool like this for them