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Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

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Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#21

Post by davidgu »

orliesaurus wrote: post #15

Congrats on ur launch. Amanda has the strongest LinkedIn game I have ever seen in my life. On the other hand the product is IMHO at risk? Models like Whisper, DistilWhisper, TinyLlama, miniGPT-4, OpenHermes, Vosk, and Llama.cpp make Recall.ai meeting transcription easy to replicate. IMHO in 1 weekend you can build an open-source tech stacks that can rival or EVEN surpass the value brought....or am I tripping?

Amanda says thank you so much!

I actually agree that it’s become incredibly easy to transcribe conversations using open-source models, and that’s not where Recall adds the most value. The hard part is building the infrastructure that allows you to get real-time access to the raw audio, video, and transcript data directly from the meeting platforms. We abstract all of that away and provide you with a clean interface to access that data. Once you get the data, you could use any of the models that you mentioned to do your own transcription, or transcribe using Recall’s transcription models.

Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#22

Post by apollopower »

Congrats Recall team, I've been a customer for the past 1.5 years and the entire infra layer behind meetings has let our company really focus on "what makes our beer taste better" instead of having to worry about building universal support for different (and tedious) platforms like Teams and Zoom. Eager to give the desktop recording sdk a try soon.

Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#23

Post by davidgu »

apollopower wrote: post #22

Congrats Recall team, I've been a customer for the past 1.5 years and the entire infra layer behind meetings has let our company really focus on "what makes our beer taste better" instead of having to worry about building universal support for different (and tedious) platforms like Teams and Zoom. Eager to give the desktop recording sdk a try soon.

Thanks and love to hear this!

Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#24

Post by giveita »

I have Loom recorded a Zoom meeting so get it. I think for corporates though the integrated approaches are so so convenient. Have your meeting and get a summary email by doing nothing (or one click opt in). I feel like your solution is for edge cases where the mainstream ways are not possible.

Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#25

Post by nduncan_hmc »

berz01 wrote: post #3

70 cents per hour is a mountain of fees... basically a $1 per meeting. Sheesh.

It is a lot but processing real time video and audio streams inherently consumes alot of CPU. So they may not be making as much profit on that price as you'd think.

I run an open source alternative to Recall (for meeting bots), and our costs are about 8 cents per hour.

Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#26

Post by agwp »

Have you explored using speaker diarization and speaker identification, given that pyannote etc. takes this approach?

I'm curious given your decision to capture speaker names from the screen. I see the merits during desktop recording, but I can also see how this limits utility when trying to offer the same functionality across desktop and other scenarios (e.g. in-person meetings, audio uploads etc.)

Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#27

Post by davidgu »

giveita wrote: post #24

I have Loom recorded a Zoom meeting so get it. I think for corporates though the integrated approaches are so so convenient. Have your meeting and get a summary email by doing nothing (or one click opt in). I feel like your solution is for edge cases where the mainstream ways are not possible.

Just to clarify, we’re the infra layer that reliably captures and normalizes meeting data across platforms. The real value for users is what developers build on top: automated analysis, enrichment, and workflows (not the capture itself)

Modern LLMs can power sales coaching, medical scribing, legal review, support QA, and compliance reporting but they need consistent inputs to process. We handle capture/formatting/edge cases so developers can focus on models and UX

Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#28

Post by davidgu »

agwp wrote: post #26

Have you explored using speaker diarization and speaker identification, given that pyannote etc. takes this approach? I'm curious given your decision to capture speaker names from the screen. I see the merits during desktop recording, but I can also see how this limits utility when trying to offer the same functionality across desktop and other scenarios (e.g. in-person meetings, audio uploads etc.)

We already support diarization in the Desktop Recording SDK by capturing the meeting platform’s speaker-change events, so you get a diarized transcript plus precise “speaker started talking” timestamps out of the box. We also support voice-signature diarization via third-party STT providers for participants calling in from the same room

For in-person meetings and audio uploads, this is on our roadmap and in development. More to come on this!

Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#29

Post by ripped_britches »

I’m interested in how you expect to keep market share if this capability can be offered by the webrtc service provider. I saw the other comment about multiple providers, but many enterprises have just one preferred path. For example I’ve been recording Google drive calls and the transcript goes straight into my Google drive.

Re: Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts

#30

Post by davidgu »

ripped_britches wrote: post #29

I’m interested in how you expect to keep market share if this capability can be offered by the webrtc service provider. I saw the other comment about multiple providers, but many enterprises have just one preferred path. For example I’ve been recording Google drive calls and the transcript goes straight into my Google drive.

For internal use cases like recording your own meetings into Google Drive, the native tools work fine.

Where we come in is for companies building products that need to support all of their customers across Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, etc. Most enterprises don’t want five different integrations, and native APIs often come with restrictions (like only the organizer being able to access the file, or recordings not being available until after the call).

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