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Show HN: Yogurt – Free, private, open-source alternative to Granola
282 points108 comments4 average comments/hourSubmitted by brownrout
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Submission text
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=BFfbXAwRq98
Similar 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 :)
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Granola, Yogurt... I present Biscotti, yet another OSS meeting recorder. 100% local. Mine is MacOS native UI, no Electron/Tauri. https://github.com/scosman/Biscotti
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct repliesI 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.
Comment on Hacker NewsI’ll add it to my open-source directory[0]. 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
Comment on Hacker News · 9 direct repliesThis is totally off topic, but how do people feel about generic names like Yogurt? I've always sort of assumed it wasnt a good idea because there is collision everywhere (SEO, registries, domain, etc).
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct repliesGoogle also has a (beta) solution for this. https://developers.google.com/edge/foresight It's free and uses local models.
Comment on Hacker Newscongrats! My wife showed me Granola one day and I was horrified on the privacy aspects of it. So I also built something similar but for advanced Super users - Notesy I have been using for 6 months and just love it (and my wife moved over too!). Uses the Gemini APIs (they are so fast, so cheap and so good!). Now we actually use it within the company as well! Rolling out wider in Testflight below. Notesy: https://prairie-petition-enterprises-expressions.trycloudfla... - keeps the audio file - custom prompts to modify notes as you want - transcripts and notes - batches by people you have talked to - a master task list - Sync all files and audio and notes to Google Drive - Shipping now with our API for testing but you can switch to your own Gemini API in settings! Uploading the repo shortly on github by this weekend! More on the privacy features here https://x.com/jharohit/status/2084204163416601026 Other apps we are building on similar lines of privacy and your own data and AI concept: APP STORE: https://contrast-situated-priorities-leu.trycloudflare.com/
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesInteresting. Maybe I can Kill one of my vibecoded atrocities now. It was born from similar frustrations - to find a good way to record audio for small meetings on a phone (there are foss options for Android - but I need one tool to recommend; https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Voice-Recorder might be one) - transcription and summation with speaker identification in correct language, support for using list of speaker and agenda to aid transcription - all done locally. Even getting the recorded audio from android to Mac - for example localsend can help). I didn't tackle all - but a few in a python script wrapped in cosmopolitan libc. Works on Mac, seemingly Linux (Terminal on chromeOS) - possibly windows (laptop just about back from repairs, not tested yet). It's an experiment - source not open yet - and op is probably better. But for the curious: https://hypertekst.net/steno/
Comment on Hacker NewsCongrats on the launch! I had a similar idea and wanted 100% local meeting recording and dictation that runs natively on Mac. https://epilude.com Good to see more being built in this space for local first :)
Comment on Hacker Newsi'm using https://github.com/Zackriya-Solutions/meetily
Comment on Hacker NewsOpenWhispr [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. So, why Yogurt? 1: https://github.com/OpenWhispr/openwhispr
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct replies