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Posted by u/yujonglee 8 months ago
Launch HN: Hyprnote (YC S25) – An open-source AI meeting notetaker
Hi HN! We're Yujong, John, Duck, and Sung from Hyprnote (https://hyprnote.com). We're building an open-source, privacy-first AI note-taking app that runs fully on-device. Think of it as an open-source Granola. No Zoom bots, no cloud APIs, no data ever leaves your machine.

Source code: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote Demo video: https://hyprnote.com/demo

We built Hyprnote because some of our friends told us that their companies banned certain meeting notetakers due to data concerns, or they simply felt uncomfortable sending data to unknown servers. So they went back to manual note-taking - losing focus during meetings and wasting time afterward.

We asked: could we build something just as useful, but completely local?

Hyprnote is a desktop app that transcribes and summarizes meetings on-device. It captures both your mic input and system audio, so you don't need to invite bots. It generates a summary based on the notes you take. Everything runs on local AI models by default, using Whisper and HyprLLM. HyprLLM is our proof-of-concept model fine-tuned from Qwen3 1.7B. We learned that summarizing meetings is a very nuanced task and that a model's raw intelligence (or weight) doesn't matter THAT much. We'll release more details on evaluation and training once we finish the 2nd iteration of the model (still not that good we can make it a lot better).

Whisper inference: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/blob/main/crates/whispe...

AEC inference: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/blob/main/crates/aec/sr...

LLM inference: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/blob/main/crates/llama/...

We also learned that for some folks, having full data controllability was as important as privacy. So we support custom endpoints, allowing users to bring in their company's internal LLM. For teams that need integrations, collaboration, or admin controls, we're working on an optional server component that can be self-hosted. Lastly, we're exploring ways to make Hyprnote work like VSCode, so you can install extensions and build your own workflows around your meetings.

We believe privacy-first tools, powered by local models, are going to unlock the next wave of real-world AI apps.

We're here and looking forward to your comments!

itsalotoffun · 8 months ago
I'm always amazed at these relatively tiny projects that "launch" with a "customers" list that reads like they've spent 10 years doing hard outbound enterprise sales: Google, Intel, Apple, Amazon, Deloitte, IBM, Ford, Meta, Uber, Tencent, etc.
Aurornis · 8 months ago
This one is especially bad because I doubt all of those companies allow employees to install unapproved software that records meetings and uses so many 3rd party APIs

The social proof logo list is an old scheme on the growth hacking checklist. There was a time when it was supposed to mean the company had purchased the software. Now it just means they knew someone who worked at those companies who said they’d check it out.

At this point, when I visit a small product’s landing page and see the logo list the first thing I think of is that they’re small and desperate to convince me they’re not.

snthpy · 8 months ago
Wow, I had no idea that the bar was that low. That's ridiculous. I think I'll follow your approach from now on.
herval · 8 months ago
We’re firmly in a world where “cheat on everything” is an acceptable business, startups that were hacked together in a week at YC claim they have SOC2 and vibecoded GPT wrappers claim they “trained a model”. Shameless lying took over tech, and if anyone catches you lying, you double down, make a scene and a bunch of podcasts will talk about you. Free advertising!

Of course, dishonesty is as old as time, but these last couple of years have been hard to watch…

quantum_state · 7 months ago
People learn fast from the Whitehouse
paulhart · 8 months ago
Yeah, IBM employee here, not speaking on behalf of the company, own opinions etc. The odds this is approved for employee use are essentially zero.
johntopia · 8 months ago
have to admit that we did some logo plays. but our users are really all over the place and just wanted to show it off! i am not sure how it looked but that's why we didn't use terms like "teams" or "customers" to be honest while showing some validation.
petesergeant · 8 months ago
> we did some logo plays

Help me understand what this means

48terry · 8 months ago
> i am not sure how it looked

Well, it looks a lot like you're playing word games to get clout-by-association that you don't necessarily deserve. That doesn't seem like something an authentic person (or people) would try to do. Are the other claims about your team and software equally unserious?

Lionga · 8 months ago
"Logo play" is such a YCombinator word for Lie.
yonl · 8 months ago
Congrats on the launch. I never understood why an AI meeting notetaker needed sota LLMs and subscriptions (talking about literally all the other notetakers) - thanks for making it local first. I use a locally patched up whisperx + qwen3:1.7 + nomic embed (ofcourse with a swift script that picks up the audio buffer from microphone) and it works just fine. Rarely i create next steps / sop from the transcript - i use gemini 2.5 and export it as pdf. I’ll give Hyprnote a try soon.

I hope, since it’s opensource, you are thinking about exposing api / hooks for downstream tasks.

Aurornis · 8 months ago
> I never understood why an AI meeting notetaker needed sota LLMs and subscriptions

I’m the opposite: If something is expected to accurately summarize business content, I want to use the best possible model for it.

The difference between a quantized local model that can run on the average laptop and the latest models from Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI is still very significant.

pollyrocket · 8 months ago
For summarizing context, it's not that far off. I've summarized notes using Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Qwen3 8b, and there a difference, but not huge.
yujonglee · 8 months ago
What kind of API/Hooks you expect us to expose? We are down to do that.
sjayasinghe · 8 months ago
The ability to receive live transcripts from a webhook, including speaker diarization metadata would be super useful.
headcanon · 8 months ago
registering an MCP server and calling an MCP tool upon transcript completion (and/or summary completion) would help (check out actionsperminute.io for the vision there).

Calendar integration would be nice to link transcripts to discrete meetings.

satvikpendem · 8 months ago
Can you share the Swift script? I was thinking of doing something similar but was banging my head against the audio side of macOS.
teiferer · 8 months ago
Nice!

Would be great if you could include in your launch message how you plan to monetize this. Everybody likes open source software and local-first is excellent too, but if you mention YC too then everybody also knows that there is no free lunch, so what's coming down the line would be good to know before deciding whether to give it a shot or just move on.

yujonglee · 8 months ago
For individuals:

We have a Pro license implemented in our app. Some non-essential features like custom templates or multi-turn chat are gated behind a paid license. (A custom STT model will also be included soon.) There's still no sign-up required. We use keygen.sh to generate offline-verifiable license keys. Currently, it's priced at $179/year.

For business:

If they want to self-host some kind of admin server with integrations, access control, and SSO, we plan to sell a business license.

teiferer · 8 months ago
Does that mean the admin server is not open source?
thedevilslawyer · 8 months ago
Another sso.tax candidate.

Let's actively not support software that chooses anti-security.

polyaniline · 8 months ago
I just tried to build on Linux and it keeps panicking because it requires dozen(s) of API keys. I was not expecting that from local first software.
yujonglee · 8 months ago
That is not actually required. You can even set empty key for that.

Also Linux issue pointer: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/issues/67#issuecomment-...

polyaniline · 8 months ago
I get an "EmptyToken" error if I leave keys like AXIOM_TOKEN empty. I'm sure I can remove the requirements in code, but it's just that this wasn't expected from reading the project description.

Anyway, thanks for your work and good luck!

hahajk · 8 months ago
I'm also interested in learning about why the API keys are required to build.
yujonglee · 8 months ago
There are only 2 api keys that is required to build (POSTHOG, SENTRY), and also not required to build in dev, only in release build.

I made it required to prevent accidentally ship app without any analytics/error tracking. (analytics can be opted out)

For ex, https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/blob/327ef376c1091d093c...

EDIT: Prod -> release

btown · 8 months ago
How are you balancing accuracy vs. time-to-word-on-live-transcript? Is this something you're actively balancing, or can allow an end user to tune?

I find myself often using otter.ai - because while it's inferior to Whisper in many ways, and anything but on-device, it's able to show words on the live transcript with minimal delay, rather than waiting for a moment of silence or for a multi-second buffer to fill. That's vital if I'm using my live transcription both to drive async summarization/notes and for my operational use in the same call, to let me speed-read to catch up to a question that was just posed to me while I was multitasking (or doing research for a prior question!)

It sometimes boggles me that we consider the latency of keypress-to-character-on-screen to be sacrosanct, but are fine with waiting for a phrase or paragraph or even an entire conversation to be complete before visualizing its transcription. Being able to control this would be incredible.

yujonglee · 8 months ago
It is more like ai model problem(then app logic. doing it more frequently will require more computation. Things like speculative decoding can help though).

Doing it locally is hard, but we expect to ship it very soon. Please join our Discord(https://hyprnote.com/discord) if you are interested to hear from us.

crashabr · 8 months ago
Do you intend to reach feature parity with something like MacWhisper? I'd love to switch to something open source, but automated meeting detection, push to transcribe (with custom rewrite actions) are two features I've learned to love, beside basic transcript. I also enjoy the automatic transcription from an audio, video or a even a YouTube link.

But because MacWhisper does not store transcripts or do much with them (other than giving you export options), there are some missed opportunities: I'd love to be able to add project tags to transcripts, so that any new transcript is summarized with the context of all previous transcript summaries that share the same tag. Thinking about it maybe I should build a Logseq extension to do that myself as I store all my meeting summaries there anyway.

Speaker detection is not great in MacWhisper (at least in my context where I work mostly with non native English speakers), so that would be a good differentiation too.

johntopia · 8 months ago
definitely planning to catch up to other tools - we ship FAST!

automated meeting detection - working on this. push to transcribe - want to understand more about this. (could we talk more over at our discord? https://hyprnote.com/discord)

if you're using logseq, we'd love to build an integration for you.

finally, speaker identification is a big challenge for us too.

so many things to do - so exciting!

dexterdog · 8 months ago
> finally, speaker identification is a big challenge for us too.

But your home page makes it looks like you already have it. I just tried it in a 30-minute meeting with 20 people and it put the entire conversation under a single speaker, in a single paragraph.

mentalgear · 8 months ago
Looks great & kudos for making it local-first & open-source, much appreciated!

From a business perspective, and as someone looking also into the open-source model to launch tools, I'd be interested though how you expect revenue to be generated?

Is it solely relying on the audience segment that doesn't know how to hook up the API manually to use the open-source version? How do you calculate this, since pushing it via open-source/github you would think that most people exposed to it are technical enough to just run it from source.

yujonglee · 8 months ago
I mentioned about the monetization plan in other threads! (search with 'license').

Hope that make sense

jihomie · 8 months ago
Hello, I am a manager at a tech firm. Came across your product, and feeling this could be a thing I was looking for these days - recently got banned of some notetakers. Impressive demo video btw!

First of all I wanna try this on my personal device. How can I implement your product in my devices?

I also want to discuss some points (on-device, self-hosting, open-source, etc.) to persuade our compliance team, as well

johntopia · 8 months ago
would love to support you! you can just download it from our website if you're using a mac.
jihomie · 8 months ago
Thanks for the prompt response.

How about the Window(more of native Window OS than VM or WSL) case? What's your plan for Window version launch and support?