I live in a two party consent state and have yet to pull the trigger on an AI transcription service. Yogurt is the first appropriate implementation of the service in my opinion, both for personal privacy and to limit potential issues if Granola or similar service gets hacked and transcriptions go public.
I appreciate that you included a default warning for the owner to let everyone on the call know they are being recorded. It might be ideal to take that a step further and have the popup occur again if another party joins the call and should also be notified of the recording.
OpenWhispr [1] is one of the earliest in this exact space, and it already supports a greater variety of models than Yogurt. Also supports meeting transcription, summarization, dictation etc. in similar ways as Yogurt.
I'd also like to mention Steno - I particularly like how you can create different summarization templates (prompts) for each recording, which allows me to leverage it for things such as therapy sessions and voice journaling.
Time to start working on gruel! Please sir may I have some more? Plus the assumption that it is slop can be well founded (no reflection on the possibility fine products above)
It's a lot of fun to see what people can do with the voice transcription tools available now that are all open source.
I've been building my own Jarvis, and I still haven't built my own meeting mode for him yet, though it's on the trajectory. I may borrow some ideas from this.
I really like the filter for the whispered, hallucinated words that Whisper sometimes hears, like, "Thanks for watching," when it's silent. That's cool.
I do a similar splitting of speech, but I think a slightly different mechanism. So I'll have to take a look at how well yours works.
And, I'm not checking the loudness of the mic and the computer audio to figure out when the speaker output is leaking. That's nice.
If there was anything I would add to yours, it would be diarization on the same inputs. So the room mic might have two or three people behind it, and to have diarization for that to know who is talking at any one time would be probably helpful. I use NVIDIA's Nemotron on the Mac. https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Nemotron-3-Diarization
Yeh echo detection is clutch. Definitely borrow some parts. Would love to solve same room voice assignments - haven’t seen ah great solutions for that yet.
As a consumer it doesn't bother me at all and probably the same if I were a provider.
Also somewhat off topic - I've been getting a ton of spam calls now that I've put my phone number on my google business profile. They are robo calls with essentially the same text: "Don't hang up" and "Please stay on the line".
My question is: Could we use these same technologies to build an app to detect certain strings and just hand up? Or on my behalf, press 1 and when the scammer - i mean operator - picks up say "Fuck off"????
Great job! It's refreshing to see something not limited to Macs/Apple Silicon.
When starting out, did you consider:
- Handy, either forking it or adding PRs?
- If you disliked the Handy UI, what about the choice of backend? Did you look into RealtimeSTT? The author is really serious about ASR and transcription
There are a 1000 Mac ASR and transcription projects, so it's really refreshing to see something that others outside the Mac garden can use - my worry is that by not reusing more mature foundations, you end up taking too much of a burden and burn out. The non Apple Silicon space needs more projects like these!
I’d love to see evals for how similar this is to Granola for meeting summarisation, on the github page
It should be possible given granola stores the transcript and the summary.
Granola has been such a fantastic sticky product for me given how simple it is: guaranteed a good summary, and a MCP that is a couple of clicks to setup with Claude/ChatGPT.
Great work! Personally would love the option to skip out on some of local model post processing features or optionally offload it to openrouter, the summarization steps and the ask feature eat up tons of resources.
I also got frustrated with Granola earlier this year and have been building my replacement - Noted: https://takenoted.com/
It shares similar principles but is (currently) closed source and mac-only.
Take a look at anarlog as well - it's a great project and I wish I'd found it earlier as I probably would have contributed instead of starting my own: https://anarlog.so/
Let me know if you want to compare notes - I am sure we have hit a lot of the same issues.
Enable transcription and at the end summarize it, and those are your notes. Anything critical, pressing, or deserves immediate attention, you write it down. That’s it! Not sure why there are so many apps redoing it over and over again in a very similar way.
Yogurt team - congratulations on your launch. I am not throwing a wrench at you. Those are my thoughts about this category in general.
I made something like this myself but because I didn't want anyone to know I was doing it, no bot in the call, I couldn't diarise the notes. I have what's been said, but not who said it. Did you manage to solve this?
I managed to solve this with my similar open source tool, including remembering "voices" across multiple sessions.. though I wouldn't say this is amazingly effective. It's not as good as when your call provider clearly knows which person is speaking, but it's largely been good enough.
Yeah Yogurt uses accessibility permissions to grab speaker names from Zoom, Google Meet, etc. But that said, I recommend you let people know if you're going to take a recording.
Can you please add a model selector? I already have gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-QAT-MLX-4bit on my MacBook, and I see Gemma 4 26B is one of the models that will be downloaded automatically for my 64GB machine.
looks amazing! if you used AI coding agents to build this, any reason why you couldn't refactor this to use gpui or rune to still get cross platform but have better performance?
oh, interesting. you mean you tried the other frameworks but decided against them because you couldn't achieve the desired user interface with their constructs?
... for those that not initiated and don't want to be nerd sniped. I wish Hackernews allowed a concensus changing of post titles to add missing contect.
I appreciate that you included a default warning for the owner to let everyone on the call know they are being recorded. It might be ideal to take that a step further and have the popup occur again if another party joins the call and should also be notified of the recording.
So, why Yogurt?
1: https://github.com/OpenWhispr/openwhispr
How does it differ from Muesli[1] and OpenOats[2]?
0. https://opensource.builders/alternatives/granola
1. https://github.com/pHequals7/muesli
2. https://github.com/yazinsai/OpenOats
That's just scratching the surface, I have never used any of these apps including others referenced in this thread.
https://github.com/stenolabs/stenoai
I've been building my own Jarvis, and I still haven't built my own meeting mode for him yet, though it's on the trajectory. I may borrow some ideas from this.
I really like the filter for the whispered, hallucinated words that Whisper sometimes hears, like, "Thanks for watching," when it's silent. That's cool.
I do a similar splitting of speech, but I think a slightly different mechanism. So I'll have to take a look at how well yours works.
And, I'm not checking the loudness of the mic and the computer audio to figure out when the speaker output is leaking. That's nice.
If there was anything I would add to yours, it would be diarization on the same inputs. So the room mic might have two or three people behind it, and to have diarization for that to know who is talking at any one time would be probably helpful. I use NVIDIA's Nemotron on the Mac. https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Nemotron-3-Diarization
And, I have enrollment for voices with speaker embeddings using this: https://github.com/wenet-e2e/wespeaker
I've always sort of assumed it wasnt a good idea because there is collision everywhere (SEO, registries, domain, etc).
Also somewhat off topic - I've been getting a ton of spam calls now that I've put my phone number on my google business profile. They are robo calls with essentially the same text: "Don't hang up" and "Please stay on the line".
My question is: Could we use these same technologies to build an app to detect certain strings and just hand up? Or on my behalf, press 1 and when the scammer - i mean operator - picks up say "Fuck off"????
When starting out, did you consider:
- Handy, either forking it or adding PRs?
- If you disliked the Handy UI, what about the choice of backend? Did you look into RealtimeSTT? The author is really serious about ASR and transcription
There are a 1000 Mac ASR and transcription projects, so it's really refreshing to see something that others outside the Mac garden can use - my worry is that by not reusing more mature foundations, you end up taking too much of a burden and burn out. The non Apple Silicon space needs more projects like these!
How exactly?
Edit: Ah I see the parent company - https://frigade.com/
Then I realized it's the parent company which was backed in 2023, not this particular project. This is I think borderline abusing the yc name.
It should be possible given granola stores the transcript and the summary.
Granola has been such a fantastic sticky product for me given how simple it is: guaranteed a good summary, and a MCP that is a couple of clicks to setup with Claude/ChatGPT.
https://github.com/kouhxp/yapsnap
It shares similar principles but is (currently) closed source and mac-only.
Take a look at anarlog as well - it's a great project and I wish I'd found it earlier as I probably would have contributed instead of starting my own: https://anarlog.so/
Let me know if you want to compare notes - I am sure we have hit a lot of the same issues.
Also, what’s the current best STT model? Apple’s dictation model isn’t good which is one big reason why I don’t use STT much.
Yogurt team - congratulations on your launch. I am not throwing a wrench at you. Those are my thoughts about this category in general.
Source code is here if you want to have an agent take a look: https://github.com/robgough/dictator/
... for those that not initiated and don't want to be nerd sniped. I wish Hackernews allowed a concensus changing of post titles to add missing contect.
"Yogurt!? Yogurt! I hate yogurt! Even with strawberries!"