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Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

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Re: Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

#41

Post by plaguuuuuu »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #36
addozhang wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really recommend it. If the software is a one-time purchase, there's no need to rewrite it with an LLM. Rewriting the tokens could cost more than just $10.

* full price tokens, yes Not the subsidized subs

I'd much rather spend $10 than have to sit at a prompt every day babysitting the thing, after working all day sitting at a prompt babysitting other things

Re: Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

#42

Post by AG342 »

denbyc wrote: post #11

I'd love to have a purchase option not tied to the App Store if possible. I don't use an Apple account with my Mac, but I would love to try Trace.

This is definitely on the to-do list if there’s enough demand for it. The payment/distribution/updates infra required is not insignificant, especially if nobody was that bothered, but by the sounds of it they are so I’ll bump this up the priority list.

Re: Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

#43

Post by usernametaken29 »

I don’t have this particular use case right now but if anything it feels like LLMs and their distilled on prem models are starting to kill SaaS simply because it becomes more and more tenable to build a “complete software” in a short time frame. That’s freaking awesome. Good idea and love the return of the good old you buy, you own it mentality

Re: Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

#44

Post by thenipper »

denbyc wrote: post #11

I'd love to have a purchase option not tied to the App Store if possible. I don't use an Apple account with my Mac, but I would love to try Trace.

Also agreed, my work prohibits App Store apps so i have to skip things like this.

Re: Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

#47

Post by geniium »

addozhang wrote: post #45

This is an excellent product and exactly what I've been looking for. But most of my meetings are done on my company Mac, and they definitely won't let me install this kind of software, even though I'd be willing to pay for it myself.

And if it runs on the browser without install it would not probably be able to record your other browser (or app) audio

Re: Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

#49

Post by blopker »

Folcon wrote: post #37
blopker wrote: post #17

Nice! I really like how many variations on this idea are coming out. MacWhisper used to be great, but is kinda of a buggy mess now. I'm making my own, for personal use. I did a survey of many and they all (that I could find) skip the fundamentals. The major issues that I've run into: - Crash recovery. Most of these apps are incredibly buggy and crash all the time, taking the recorded audio with them. Macwhisper is in…

> I've yet to find a solution that handles all these correctly, let alone having high quality transcriptions. Wait really? I honestly would have thought this was a solved problem by now, especially high quality transcriptions bit, just out of curiosity, is the problem that the quality isn't high enough?

There are still a few unsolved problems that require tuning for specific applications. Applications that own the video call have a much easier time, they have access to each individual audio stream. Applications like this, however, have to deal with overlapping voices from a single stream. If it's trying to attribute each utterance to an individual, separating the voices is tough, or can lead to confusing transcripts. There are many little problems like this which make it a tough problem in real world usage. Domain specific terms, or proper nouns is another source of inaccuracy.

Re: Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

#50

Post by scosman »

blopker wrote: post #17

Nice! I really like how many variations on this idea are coming out. MacWhisper used to be great, but is kinda of a buggy mess now. I'm making my own, for personal use. I did a survey of many and they all (that I could find) skip the fundamentals. The major issues that I've run into: - Crash recovery. Most of these apps are incredibly buggy and crash all the time, taking the recorded audio with them. Macwhisper is in…

I had the same experience so started building my own. All problems are solvable, just working on the polish.

- crash recovery: part one is use ADTS aac (even if process crashes, audio is saved up until it does). Part two is isolating the transcription/summaries in separate XPC services.

- disk space: AAC 64kbps mono soles it. Could use Opus for further reduction but both are small.

- speaker bleed: macOS voice isolation processing solves this. It’s a nightmare to get setup, but works great once done.

- library: using argmax SDK - by a bunch of ex-Apple on device AI folks.

It it wasn’t for CoreAudio, I’d say it was easy to make. Argmax, Whisper, and llama.cpp - wrapped in the right architecture, mostly just work.

I’m having fun nerding out on the details like custom vocabulary (get the names of the people in here meeting right), inferring speaker names from transcript, calendar integration, nice UI, etc.

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