Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

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• Hacker News
• 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.

  by robertkarl
• 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.
  by addozhang
• The key moments feat is neat. Been working on a free opensource offline transcriber that runs fast on CPU and does diarization too

  https://github.com/kouhxp/yapsnap

  by mrkn1
• 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

  by tillcarlos
• Agreed with JohnBiz, the moment flagging is interesting and unusual, and a nice contrast to passive transcription. I only recently learned about MacWhisper (I'm Windows primarily) and was floored to learn how expensive the Pro option is. Nowadays it's not so hard to have some-level of DIY transcription, so crazy that it's priced with a premium.

  What's your diarization pipeline? Pyannote?

  I'd taken a different approach that used a LLM clean-up pass to summarize and progressively compress the transcript for ultra-long content, but I like the idea of targeted "pay attention here" flags.

  by watchlight
• I'd love to have a purchase option not tied to the App Store if possible. I don't use an Apple account with my Mac, but I would love to try Trace.
  by denbyc
• 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!

  by scimonk
• 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 incredibly bad at this.

  - Disk space. Many of these apps save wav files to disk. After a few hours of meetings, you may end up with gigabytes eaten.

  - Microphone bleed. People don't always use headphones, the system mic will pick up the speaker sounds, causing duplicate (approximately) transcriptions.

  I've yet to find a solution that handles all these correctly, let alone having high quality transcriptions.

  Anyway, most of these apps are built around https://github.com/FluidInference/FluidAudio, if anyone is curious. Their readme has a big list of similar apps as well.

  by blopker