Yogurt, a free and open-source app for AI meeting notes, hit the Hacker News front page on Wednesday, Nov 11. Its maker pitches it as a private alternative to Granola, the popular AI note taker. Like Granola, it does not send a bot into your call. Unlike Granola, the audio, transcript and summary never leave your computer. The Show HN thread had 224 points and 92 comments by 11:25 PM PT, and the GitHub repo had 559 stars at the same time. Here is what people are saying.
What Yogurt is
The developer, brownrout, who signs the post as Eric, says he built it in his free time. It is a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux under the MIT license, made by Frigade. It records your microphone and the sound from your computer, so no bot joins the meeting. Transcription uses whisper.cpp, or Apple's SpeechAnalyzer on supported Macs. A local open-weight model runs through llama.cpp to write the summary and answer questions about your meetings.
His case for it: "You do not need a frontier model to summarize meeting notes or answer questions about them." If you want ChatGPT or Claude to read your notes, Yogurt has a local MCP server you can connect.
Per the README, it needs 8 GB of memory, works offline after a one-time model download, and first fetches a notes model of about 5 GB, then a larger one that "can be 14 GB or more". Speaker names and calendar features are Mac only for now.
The praise: privacy without a bot
Most of the warm replies were about privacy. lavendermon, who lives in a two-party consent state, wrote: "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."
david_shi liked the approach: "It's mindboggling that in light of all the hacks people will still install keyloggers and apps that take screenshots of your desktop and upload them, especially when alternatives exist." ProblemExplorer praised the platform support: "It's refreshing to see something not limited to Macs/Apple Silicon."
On X, posts were small but upbeat. @DanteMMartin wrote: "Granola sells a subscription; this ships a repo and keeps the transcript yours." @PinakCorp put it as a bet: "meeting AI wins by leaving the room." @gupta_pranjal opened with: "Every meeting now has one guest nobody invited: the notetaker bot." None of the X posts we found had more than a few likes, so most of the real discussion is on Hacker News.
The first hands-on test
Only one commenter posted a test. shireboy wrote: "Just tried it on a teams call and it did great transcribing and summarizing. It didn't pick up the other speaker's name though."
That matches a question from walthamstow, who built a similar tool and could not tell speakers apart without a bot in the call. brownrout replied that Yogurt "uses accessibility permissions to grab speaker names from Zoom, Google Meet, etc." The README says speaker names work on Mac only.
rc1 asked for a real benchmark: "I'd love to see evals for how similar this is to Granola for meeting summarisation." brownrout said he would look into it. No one posted numbers in the thread.
The complaints: Electron, memory and model size
The app is built on Electron. Aniket-N wrote: "The electron use is giving me pause. It's going to eat up memory." rc1 replied: "So will the local models."
austinhutch said "the summarization steps and the ask feature eat up tons of resources" and asked for an option to send that work to OpenRouter. brownrout answered: "Will add support for that soon." yevmiyeci asked a security question: "is the local mcp server auth'd somehow or can any local app read the transcripts?" No one answered it in the thread, but the README does. Access is off until you turn it on, apps get read-only access, and there is no per-app token, so any app running under your account can read your meetings while access is on.
A very crowded field
The biggest theme was that many people have already built the same thing. The thread filled with alternatives: Muesli, OpenOats, OpenWhispr, Anarlog, Biscotti, Steno, Talky and others. achrono asked "So, why Yogurt?" and noted that OpenWhispr "already supports a greater variety of models." rrr_oh_man replied: "There can be more than one Italian restaurant in town."
scosman joined in with his own app: "Granola, Yogurt... I present Biscotti, yet another OSS meeting recorder." mandeepj questioned the whole category: "Not sure why there are so many apps redoing it over and over again in a very similar way."
Two side debates got attention. gokaygurcan checked the YC company list and found that a "Backed by Y Combinator" line commenters spotted refers to the parent company Frigade, not this project, and called it "borderline abusing the yc name." And the name itself drew jokes. jonas21 wrote: "My issue is that yogurt is a complement to granola, not a replacement."
Consent is the open question
Because no bot joins the call, other people may not know they are being recorded. insane_dreamer said that is the main concern. With Google's own offering, they wrote, "at least it does ensure everyone knows the call is being recorded." brownrout recommends you "let people know if you're going to take a recording," and lavendermon noted the app shows a default reminder. lavendermon also suggested the reminder should appear again when a new person joins.
The mood: people like a free, local Granola alternative that works beyond the Mac, but they want proof it summarizes as well as Granola, lighter resource use, and clearer answers on speaker names and consent. For other options, see our guide to the best AI note-taking apps.
