Talat’s AI meeting notes stay on your machine, not in the cloud

Summary

The AI-powered notetaking app Granola, valued at $250 million, has become a popular tool among tech industry founders and VCs. But one developer believes there’s demand for a more private, local-only alternative that’s available for a one-time fee and without a subscription. That’s led to the creation of a new Mac app called Talat. Yorkshire, England-based developer Nick Payne, a self-described computer nerd, says the idea to build a local AI notetaker came about mostly because of a series of happy accidents. “I think Granola is awesome; it’s a shining example of what you can do with an Electron app [a framework for building desktop applications] given enough love and care,” he told TechCrunch. “When I first tried it, I was fascinated that it managed to record system audio on my Mac without recording video, which was the standard workaround at the time. That led to a ton of research, discovering a relatively new and poorly documented Apple API.” To make it easier to work with that API (Core Audio Taps, which lets developers tap into a Mac’s audio streams), Payne decided to create an open source audio library, AudioTee. “During that time, I was slowly piecing together a toolkit, but I never found anything that felt like it could stand on its own as a product rather than just a cool tech demo,” Payne said. “The state-of-the-art hosted transcription models — the same providers folks like Granola use — are incredible, and it’s viscerally cool to see your speech unfurled onscreen in near real time. But it always nagged me that the trade-off required providing not just my data, but my audio data; my actual voice,” he added. He then stumbled upon a software toolkit called FluidAudio, a Swift framework that enables fully local, low-latency audio AI on Apple devices. It lets you run small, fast transcription models directly on the Mac’s Neural Engine — Apple’s dedicated hardware for AI processing. That was the piece that made Payne realize he could turn his research into an ...