alt Hacker NewsShow 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=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 :)
Comments
I’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
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.
readme could use the details from this post tbh. also is the local mcp server auth’d somehow or can any local app read the transcripts?
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.
The electron use is giving me pause. It’s going to eat up memory.
My company uses https://github.com/itskhalil/talky
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?
Gonna give this a try! I too stopped all the other subscriptions and have been looking for something that works well.
Is it possible to choose which model or models are used for transcription? Are other languages, such as French, supported?
Currently using OpenWhispr. What is the difference between the two?
How does this compare to OpenWhispr and similar apps?
"Private AI meeting notes. Free and open source"
... 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.
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?
The name reminds me of the line in Spaceballs:
"Yogurt!? Yogurt! I hate yogurt! Even with strawberries!"
[flagged]
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!