HN Explorer

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

270 points by yujonglee ↗ HN
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!

50 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 75.4 ms ] thread
yunohn
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?
nkotov
Really cool - how does it compare to Granola outside of the OSS part?
theodorewiles
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

yonl
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
> 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
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.
marcofiset
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.

ls-a
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.
nashashmi
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.
b0dhimind
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
Congrats on the launch. Is there a reason why the app isn't sandboxed?
p2hari
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)
kocial
Nicely done, I or someone can push the translation option too. Well done.
turnsout
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!
teiferer
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.

rushingcreek
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
Congratulations! Is there a mobile version as well, especially for Android?
tomr75
why use whisper over parakeet? how will you monetise?
pokechamp
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

kpen11
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?

ljosa
Why in the world is there _background music_ when I start the app?!
Adrig
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
btown
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
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.