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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

#51

Post by AG342 »

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…

Crash recovery is definitely something that I want to spend a bit more time on. I'm not entirely sure how Trace handles crashing right in the middle of a recording, so I'm going to put a bit of time aside in the next few days to properly explore this and see if I can come up with an elegant solution to it.

I think I've got the other two bits covered. I pushed an update yesterday that adds active echo cancellation so that audio playing through the speakers (or leaky headphones) won't get transcribed twice if it is picked up by the microphone. It can be disabled in preferences, but it's on by default.

The disk space issue is one that I considered as well. By default, Trace deletes the actual audio recordings as soon as transcription is successfully completed, so the idea is you keep just the markdown transcript rather than the gigabytes of raw audio. If you want, there's a preference to disable the auto-deletion. There's a bit more on the support page here https://traceapp.info/support (search for "Auto-deletion of audio").

FluidAudio is a big part of this and is actually used in two places during a session. It runs the Parakeet EOU model for the instant recap (which isn't hugely accurate, but it's good enough for the job) and after the call it's also used to transcribe the recording, depending on which engine you've selected (Trace offers a fast and an accurate one). If the fast engine is selected, we use FluidAudio with the Parakeet-TDT 0.6b v3 model for transcription, which then goes through Pyannote and WeSpeaker for diarization. If the accurate engine is selected, we use WhisperKit with the Whisper large-v3-turbo model for transcription, and SpeakerKit for diarization.

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

#52

Post by AG342 »

scosman wrote: post #48

Those transcription times are fast fast. What model/library do you use?

Trace has two engines that you can choose from. The fast one uses NVIDIA's Parakeet-TDT 0.6b v3 model run through FluidAudio, which surprised me with how fast it was. There is also an accurate engine, which uses Whisper large-v3-turbo via WhisperKit, which is slower but holds up better on accents and jargon.

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

#54

Post by nightpool »

Is this legal to use in 2 party consent states? Might vary from state to state, which is probably why both zoom and Meet require users to click through consent screens when meetings are bring transcribed. Might be useful to have that on the FAQ page

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

#55

Post by tillcarlos »

Had the same idea, but have to focus on my main business. This comes at the right time!

I just purchased it. What's the best way to give you feedback? (Do you want any?)

From the top of my head: - will the mic switch automatically when I am at my office? Or do I have to change settings every time? Maybe a preference of what's available + auto switch would be good. - I personally don't need the hot key. Menu bar icon would be fine. - Download the model is a long process. Put it into the installer, not into the bar on the bottom - Speaker correction would be amazing. If it could "Learn" the speakers based on voice. - Overall neat app. Good animations and UX

    **Speaker 1** [00:00] What if I fell to the floor?
    **Microphone** [00:02] Yes, this is Phil, I'm just speaking, this should be         my voice, and there's music in the
    **Speaker 1** [00:05] Couldn't tell this anymore

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

#56

Post by Gigachad »

nightpool wrote: post #54

Is this legal to use in 2 party consent states? Might vary from state to state, which is probably why both zoom and Meet require users to click through consent screens when meetings are bring transcribed. Might be useful to have that on the FAQ page

It would be if you tell the person you are recording first.

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

#58

Post by AG342 »

tillcarlos wrote: post #55

Had the same idea, but have to focus on my main business. This comes at the right time! I just purchased it. What's the best way to give you feedback? (Do you want any?) From the top of my head: - will the mic switch automatically when I am at my office? Or do I have to change settings every time? Maybe a preference of what's available + auto switch would be good. - I personally don't need the hot key. Menu bar icon…

Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to drop an email to hello@traceapp.info if you want a chat. Happy to hop on a call too if you'd prefer.

For the switching, do you mean if you hot-swap during a call? The mic should auto-switch if you've got System default selected, but feel free to give it a go and report back. If it doesn't do what we expect I can absolutely take a look at changing the behaviour.

Learning speakers is also on the to-do list.

P.S. Great choice in test audio. What a banger.

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

#59

Post by AG342 »

fandorin wrote: post #57

looks great! and good that you decided on the one-time fee instead of a subscription. side question: what did you use to create these videos/gifs on the homepage that shows the app? They look really good!

Appreciate it, thanks. They’re just Vue components with CSS animations. Drop me an email and I’ll send you the code.

hello@traceapp.info

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

#60

Post by AG342 »

nightpool wrote: post #54

Is this legal to use in 2 party consent states? Might vary from state to state, which is probably why both zoom and Meet require users to click through consent screens when meetings are bring transcribed. Might be useful to have that on the FAQ page

Recording and consent rules vary quite a bit by country and region, so it's on whoever is doing the recording to get the consent they need and to follow the law where they are. Still, I like the idea of putting a note on the FAQ to make that clear.
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