Show HN: Yogurt – Free, private, open-source alternative to Granola
Hey HN, I’m Eric and I want to share an OSS project that I’ve been building in my free time. Yogurt is a free, MIT licensed desktop app that uses on-device AI models to transcribe, summarize, and chat with your meetings.Here's a quick demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFfbXAwRq98Similar to Granola, Yogurt runs in the background and does not join your calls. But unlike Granola, Yogurt is open-source, free to use, and private. Your meeting transcripts, call recordings, and summaries never leave your computer.As small OSS models have gotten faster and more powerful, Yogurt seemed like a pretty obvious win for privacy and cost conscious folks. You do not need a frontier model to summarize meeting notes or answer questions about them. And if you want to make your notes available to a frontier model, you can just share it with Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. directly via Yogurt’s local MCP server. There’s no need to use a paid cloud service as a middleman.I tried some of the most popular OSS note taking tools, and most were missing features like calendar integration, MCP server, etc. or required you to connect or create an account. And more than that, they didn’t feel polished enough for it to be something I actually wanted to use daily, and so I built Yogurt to scratch that itch. I spent a lot of time fine-tuning every UI interaction/animation and optimizing the model calls to get the most out of your hardware + make it snappy.To support Windows/Mac/Linux, I decided to go with Electron. I use whisper.cpp for transcription and Apple’s on-device SpeechAnalyzer if your system supports it. For call summaries and questions, I use a local open weight LLM that automatically gets downloaded and set up based on what your hardware can handle without your cooling fans firing off like crazy (this part uses llama.cpp).I’ve spent a lot of time working on details like echo detection/reduction, global/folder/local level search respectively, and auto-end recordings. Hope this is useful for any of you who have held out on using AI note tools for privacy or cost reasons, or for folks using cloud tools who want to switch to something free and open source that still feels great to use.Would love to hear what you think about the onboarding and note taking experience :)
96 points by - 41 comments
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
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 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
https://github.com/stenolabs/stenoai
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.
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!"