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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

#61

Post by kstenerud »

AG342 wrote: post #51
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…

For crash resilient data, you have a few options:

- Journaling file structures (telegraph what you're about to write, then write it, then signal completion)

- memmap your important data structures to a file (they will be flushed to disk no matter how your app dies - short of a power loss)

- post-crash dump (put last-minute writers in a crash handler to save it to disk)

A journaling file structure is the most secure, because it's designed with the assumption that writing will eventually fail. memmapped structs are easy and cheap, and get you 99% of the way there (only power loss will lose your data). Crash-time writing is doable with a crash handler like KSCrash, but there are many ways an app can crash without triggering a crash handler (thermal kill, exceeding quota, memory jetsam, etc). You also need to write your data in a signal-safe manner.

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

#63

Post by littlecranky67 »

Would love to use this app, I recently thought about coding something similar myself. I would need to only record my own voice due to privacy laws (here in Germany, you can record yourself without consent). With overthe-ear headset, the microphone only captures my voice. Would need to store the original audio plus the transcription. Ideally, you can configure it to start as soon as it detects a new window with a given title (i.e. Webex launches meetings in a new window named "Meeting ....").

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

#64

Post by scimonk »

The App looks really interesting and I’d love to try it out. How well does it work in other languages than English? For me, German would be important.

Due to audio quality, transcription sometimes produces garbled output or understands something wrong. FluidVoice offers the option to use a LLM to „interpret“ the text to rescue garbled audio through context. Do you also plan to support something like this? This would be a great feature!

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

#66

Post by PufPufPuf »

robertkarl wrote: post #28

This looks sick. I was going to download it but for $10 I am more willing to attempt asking Claude to implement something like it, than to purchase. I would be more willing to purchase if it was open source and I could build from source to try it first.

AI is great at getting you 80% there. But you have to finish the remaining 80% yourself.

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

#67

Post by ahamez »

scimonk wrote: post #64

The App looks really interesting and I’d love to try it out. How well does it work in other languages than English? For me, German would be important. Due to audio quality, transcription sometimes produces garbled output or understands something wrong. FluidVoice offers the option to use a LLM to „interpret“ the text to rescue garbled audio through context. Do you also plan to support something like this? This would…

From the website (https://traceapp.info/support#preferences):

> Which languages does Trace support? English only, for now. Both transcription models, Fast and Accurate, are built for English audio. A recording in another language will still produce a transcript, but it won’t be accurate: the model maps whatever it hears onto English words, so the result comes out garbled rather than failing outright.

> If transcribing other languages matters to you, get in touch (see Contact below).

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

#68

Post by scimonk »

ahamez wrote: post #67
scimonk wrote: post #64

The App looks really interesting and I’d love to try it out. How well does it work in other languages than English? For me, German would be important. Due to audio quality, transcription sometimes produces garbled output or understands something wrong. FluidVoice offers the option to use a LLM to „interpret“ the text to rescue garbled audio through context. Do you also plan to support something like this? This would…

From the website ( https://traceapp.info/support#preferences ): > Which languages does Trace support? English only, for now. Both transcription models, Fast and Accurate, are built for English audio. A recording in another language will still produce a transcript, but it won’t be accurate: the model maps whatever it hears onto English words, so the result comes out garbled rather than failing outright. > If transcrib…

Thanks! Somehow I missed that part. Didn't look for language support in the "preferences" section I guess.

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

#69

Post by sofixa »

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?

> 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?

If I had to guess, all of those apps are probably vibecoded, hence the variable quality.

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

#70

Post by sofixa »

geniium wrote: post #47
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

Why not? You can run Google Meet, Zoom, Teams in the browser, including screen sharing with audio sharing. The browser APIs are there (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt...).
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