Launch HN: Hyprnote (YC S25) – An open-source AI meeting notetaker

244 points by yujonglee 2 days ago


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 - a day 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.

yonl - 2 days 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.

teiferer - 2 days 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.

polyaniline - a day 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.

jihomie - 9 hours 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

whitefang - 5 hours ago

I started building something like this for myself and though it would be useful. I have a decent mac only working working but what you have built is great.

This one is completely open source and local, no api calls required at all. Quality can better with newer models which has to be worked on.

https://github.com/acorn-globus/waveflow

crashabr - a day 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.

btown - a day 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.

mentalgear - a day 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.

ljosa - 18 hours ago

I just tried this for a standup meeting, and the inability to tell who said what is a show stopper. You'll need to add speaker diarization for this to be useful for more than 1:1s.

p2hari - 2 days ago

I just downloaded on mac M4 pro mini. I installed the apple silicon version and try to launch it and it fails. No error message or anything. Just the icon keep bouncing on the dock. I assumed it needs some privacy and screen recording and audio permissions and explicitly gave them, however still just jumps on the dock and the app does not open. (OS, mac sequoia 15.5)

theodorewiles - 2 days ago

Looks really cool - I noticed Enterprise has smart consent management?

The thing I think some enterprise customers are worried about in this space is that in many jurisdictions you legally need to disclose recording - having a bot join the call can do that disclosure - but users hate the bot and it takes up too much visibility on many of these calls.

Would love to learn more about your approach there

AlexErrant - a day ago

I'm building a voice-controlled app, so it requires transcription. The problem is that the app talks back, so some amount of AEC is needed. It looks like your "generic" AEC is ML powered, but your planned platform specific AEC may use non-ML tech (i.e. looks like you're considering Windows/Mac specific APIs). Have you had a bad experience with AI powered AEC?

Myrmornis - 16 hours ago

This looks exactly like something that I've been saying to myself that I want! Installed, and already used to transcribe two meetings. At the moment I think that I'm going to carry on using this. Keep going, it looks great!

nashashmi - 2 days ago

I was talking about this a week ago. One person wanted to make a pdf tutorial of how to use a software. I asked him to record himself in teams and share his screen and have AI take notes. It will create a fabulous summary with snapshots of everything he is going over.

rushingcreek - 2 days ago

Congrats on the launch! I'm very bullish on how powerful <10B-param models are becoming, so the on-device angle is cool (and great for your bottom line too, as it's cheaper for you to run).

Something that I think is interesting about AI note taking products is focus. How does it choose what's important vs what isn't? The better it is at distinguishing the signal from the noise, the more powerful it is. I wonder if there is an in-context learning angle here where you can update the model weights (either directly or via LoRA) as you get to know the user better. And, of course, everything stays private and on-device.

manveerc - 2 days ago

Congratulations! Is there a mobile version as well, especially for Android?

b0dhimind - 2 days ago

Look forward to testing the Windows version. Hope it has ability to also upload recordings, etc. Meetily is nice but setup feels too convoluted, with a backend and frontend being required to separately install...

woadwarrior01 - 2 days ago

Congrats on the launch. Is there a reason why the app isn't sandboxed?

marcofiset - 2 days ago

The only issue I have with those tools, and I have not seen a single one even acknowledge this, is that it becomes completely useless when holding meetings in a hybrid fashion where some people are remote and others are in the office with a shared mic.

Almost all of our meetings are hybrid in this way, and it's a real pain having almost half of the meeting be identified as a single individual talking because the mic is hooked up to their machine.

It's a total dealbreaker for us, and we won't use such tools until that problem is solved.

kpen11 - 2 days ago

This is really cool! I've been using Obsidian more and more as a second brain and getting data in has consistently been the point of failure, so I've been wanting something just like this. Specifically something that runs locally and offline.

Is the future goal of Hyprnote specifically meeting notes and leaning into features around meeting notes, or more general note taking and recall features?

anyg - a day ago

This is perfect timing! I just cancelled my fireflies.ai subscription yesterday because it just felt unnecessary. I prefer using less platforms and more tools, especially those that can work under the surface.

joos3 - a day ago

Let's go! Trying it out, appreciate you building this as the hosted/online alternatives (Granola, Notion recorder, ChatGPT recorder etc) don't really make sense if you can record locally.

Adrig - a day ago

Since this isn't available yet on Windows, what would be the glue & duct tape alternative? Record audio and dump it in chatGPT? Or do you need to create some kind of automation with n8n / Zapier? I don't have that many meetings but it could be nice to have

ls-a - 2 days ago

Looks great. From my experience Tauri team has no clue what mobile is and they're not interested in fixing mobile issues. I can already tell the mobile version will be a disappointment.

nkotov - 2 days ago

Really cool - how does it compare to Granola outside of the OSS part?

believ3 - 18 hours ago

Any plans to integrate with native Apple Notes app?

danneezhao - a day ago

How to deal with the AI meeting recording function that comes with conference software?

eawgewag - 18 hours ago

I honestly don't care that much if Granola uploads my notes to some external service. Work conversations are not private anyways.

HOWEVER, I was extremely disturbed to find out that Granola was automatically making each of my notes folders public to the entire organization. Including 1:1s, you guessed it.

Yeah, really shook my trust in this product by a lot.

pokechamp - 2 days ago

another free tier (but not opensource) recording tool Ive been using is MacWhisper. Does this and more all locally too. Will try hyprnote out because its neat to do the transcription in real time and its note taking purposes

https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

shepardrtc - 16 hours ago

How much data is being sent to Sentry?

swyx - 2 days ago

congrats, app looks gorgeous. def a good tauri codebase to study ( been using https://deepwiki.com/fastrepl/hyprnote)

any interest in the Cluely-style live conversation help/overlay?

kocial - 2 days ago

Nicely done, I or someone can push the translation option too. Well done.

kriro - a day ago

Curious what made you decide to start with the macOS version. Some insight that most potential customers are on Macs or simply "we use Macs, dogfood time"? I'd always target Windows first for these tools.

Looks cool, I'll wait for the Linux version and try it.

Integration of automatic translations could be an interesting business plan value-add. Branching out into CRM things also makes sense to me.

Good luck, keep shipping.

hidelooktropic - a day ago

Unfortunately the GPL license makes it dead in the water for using something like this at work

:(

yunohn - 2 days ago

Super cool, congrats on the launch - will be trying this soon! I noticed it’s using Tauri - what are your main takeaways from building a local inference desktop app with it?

tomr75 - 2 days ago

why use whisper over parakeet? how will you monetise?

Zardoz84 - a day ago

I would like to try this on Linux

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turnsout - 2 days ago

Congrats! I'm currently a Granola user, and wanted to build this myself a while back. But I probably wouldn't have gone as far as fine-tuning a small model for meeting summarization. Can't wait to try it out!

ljosa - 2 days ago

Why in the world is there _background music_ when I start the app?!

thephotonsphere - 2 days ago

Looks promising, but "Linux maybe"? Signing off.

humblechan - 2 days ago

[dead]

syngrog66 - a day ago

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