Latest updates around audio processing and quality are out, I've also made a substantial addition by implementing extensions.
This allows people to hook up to M365 or Google to get desktop notifications to start the recording, it can also export to share point and stop the recording at the registered meeting end.
Was a fun process keeping the offline and online functionality completely separate, also getting validated by Microsoft for the M365 extension was a bit of a chore, but finally have the verified blue tick.
https://getsoftwarehouse.com - I'm also working on the governance layer for AI tooling that is being built by employees, there's just HTML files flying all over the place, no security, no home. So built software house as a place for these things to live, be secured, put OIDC in front etc. It's fun!
I can see the analogy, but fundementally that human liked caring for animals, they didn't like transporting the goods as effectively as possible, if they did then sitting in a box optimising delivery time would make them feel useful and respected.
The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.
And if they liked optimizing transport, but now the box is self-driving and the logistics are planned by machine? The farm is automated and humans get in the way. The vet is a robot. Also any other suggestion you have is automated - AI is now better at everything. Nobody needs or wants anything the human can do. AI is a more fun friend, a better singer, a more engaging teacher or entertainer, a better movie creator, a better cook, etc. All that's left is Postel's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", from cradle to grave nothing the human does matters or can matter. Then what?
Perfomatively going through the hollowed-out motions of human life like a toddler playing with a plastic kitchen, wishing the ghosts of meaning and fulfillment would come back into them? Enjoy!
>The human in your analogy would be better off working with animals on a farm, or vet practice, where the technological advances that deliver better care to animals would make them feel even more fulfilled.
Yes. And instead they are stuck in the role of slop doula, unable to afford the luxury of being able to perform a furfilling role in society.
> what if they no longer have to "tolerate mucking out the stables" and can instead focus on riding.
Then you haven't seen the say to day life of modern western civilization. That's not the reality. People are working more than ever for the worst buying power in a century in a time where the job market is worse tham ever. Recreation in all forms that's not scrolling social media is down, because people can't afford it.
>We could go back and forth on the analogy but I think it comes down to one of two things:
Your two things are completely orthogonal to my comments. This isn't about enjoying your job. It's about not being able to survive on the remaining jobs left (which aren't much).
Now take away the chore of 'focusing on riding'. Genetically or chemically calm the horse so it does not get flustered or moody. Metabolically tweak the horse so it does not get tired or thirsty. Robotically till and smooth the ground so there is nothing to trip over. Notify everyone in the vicinity where the horse is going, so there are no obstacles to avoid. When you can't crash or fall off if you try, when it doesn't matter if you're focusing or not. Maybe dynamically adjust that so you know the AI overlord is pampering you to keep the difficulty 'just right' and this is not a real challenge it's elaborate wireheading.
Your point 2 is where my onion metaphor comes in. When you fix a problem you improve a thing. When you fix all the problems you have taken all the life away from living. Maybe that works for what to do today - Ostrich head in the sand and solve problems - within our lifetimes, or even several lifetimes, but if AGI really does spawn and solve all problems immediately the head has to come back up. If AGI never spawns, we might still effectively solve all human-scale problems with the assistance of sub-human AI and brute-force within a surprisingly short time.
Is that because they didn't type code on the keyboard? They still had to think of an idea, conceptualise it, work and prompt AI, test the results, alter things, work through problems, stick to a direction and bring about something from nothing.
Sure your one shot generic websites don't really have any "skill" or "honour", I may as well just read a text file of what you wanted to say (and I'd prefer that), but to say there is no sweat, tears or skill to using _any_ generative AI is a little bit narrow minded.
This is much better but I can still tell. But I'm sure you guided it a lot to arrive at this state. Surely people with less care are one shotting and publishing boring websites.
FWIW, I clicked through a few pages and this doesn't register as AI slop to me at all.
At least, it's missing the cargo cult telltales like the beige or unreadable neon hax0r dark mode theme, that console looking font with three different sizes and tiny headings, formatting vomit with italics/bolding every other word, useless cards/animated colored dots, scrolling text, excess boilerplate text on every surface, useless generated tags/categories/chips everywhere, etc that plague the designs of the last year.
Overall it's clean and modern (and the interactive table actually has content not pointless filler). It definitely wouldn't have triggered my visceral slop reaction and therefore wouldn't bother me if I later learned the dev used AI to make it.
I can't speak for everyone, but personally my issue isn't the use of AI at all (I use it myself), the problem is being able to recognize a carbon copy Claude/Codex design in <5 seconds. At that point I can't help but assume it's just slop that was fired off with a couple prompts and not worth my time engaging any further.
(Mostly) the same with prose. But that's playing with fire a bit because while a website/app might have a utilitarian purpose, I will have zero motivation to continue reading text I didn't prompt myself once I suspect it's from an LLM. There's just too much spam now to give benefit of the doubt unfortunately. The writing on your site doesn't scream LLM either though so I think you're good on both fronts.
It's like the saying "if you're explaining you're losing": once the seed is planted that it's AI, it's extremely hard to successfully argue your identical Claude-designed site is the exception that deserves users' limited time. Putting in some minimal thought and care in advance to avoid that first impression means fewer of those arguments with potential users experiencing slop fatigue like me. Anyway, nice job!
> my issue isn't the use of AI at all (I use it myself), the problem is being able to recognize a carbon copy Claude/Codex design in <5 seconds. At that point I can't help but assume it's just slop that was fired off with a couple prompts and not worth my time engaging any further.
I still don't understand how these massive touchscreen displays are allowed in vehicles.
I had to rent a van that had everything "integrated" in its display. Absolutely atrocious software, latency and responsiveness for standard things such as temp and fan speed.
Also withholding this "extra" means you have to take your eyes off the road and look down to the right/left to make sure you're doing the right speed. Sounds a bit over the top, but I wonder if these designers think about the fact they might actually be the ones responsible for people dying in crashes.
Thank you, great question! Hard one to answer, thought about it a lot and it's going to be the diarisation of more than 5+ speakers per audio stream (your microphone + system audio for a max of 10). I actually spent a lot of time that went completely nowhere trying to fine tune my own diarisation model, it was fun to a degree but painful to see my output end up worse than what I currently had after days of work. Having a bot join the call would be such an easy way of diarising, the call software has already done it for you, but feels like a bit of a cop out.
Two more improvements, audio quality improvements which is currently in the works and close to release and a new document generation model. I'm currently using a custom fine tuned Phi-4 (released December 2024!) model, that's _so old_ in the grand scheme of LLMs, I just haven't had time to benchmark and properly test some new models whilst this currently does a good job as it is. There has to be some gains here, but who knows!
I think this is just to capture the audio to ship off to their servers and do the crunching. You mentioned the word "extension" and thank you so much, I've been thinking about how to do integrations as it's something a few users have mentioned, but keep the whole "completely offline" angle. I could build standalone extensions that integrate with it if it's something a user wants. So damn obvious in hindsight!
Ahh yea as for the models:
Speech to text - Nvidia Parakeet TDT 0.6b V3
Diarisation - Nvidia Marblenet for the speech detection, TitaNet-Large for the embeddings and then using NeMo multi-scale to do clustering around them
I tried something similar by putting together a "global ledger" of speaker identities. This was more happening during the call than having a predefined one but I just couldn't get it to work properly. The issue being that as soon as some speech gets assigned to a new label or an incorrect one, everything ends up getting misaligned and gets messy quickly.
I might take another look into doing it in a different way that gradually builds up from successful calls, I just need to think of how to do this in a simple(ish) way for non-technical users and a way that still works well enough on low to mid tier laptops.
I know this is hn and not a product development meeting, but:
If you’re targeting data for people to use on the same call then requires more intense work, while if you’re targeting data for people to use after or on an ongoing basis (eg an established business meeting with staff/vendors/etc) then having a predefined one seems good. Same interface as a CRM: picture, some audio clips for users to choose from, and confidence scores on each section of the recording for cases where people sound similar or are talking over each other. Over time the diarization gets better as users accept/reject/tag samples and that work helps them feel more aligned with the tool.
100% looking at it from an after use basis, whilst there is live transcription, trying to do anything above that on 6 year old laptop CPU just grinds stuff to a halt.
Some great suggestions, appreciate you taking the time to write it out, it's given me some things to think about.
Still working away on a completely offline meeting document generator that works on generic laptops with no GPU (https://whistle-enterprise.com). A new release coming very soon focusing on getting clearer audio which in turn makes the transcription and end document generated more accurate.
Inbetween that I've been working on a "software house" (don't know how else to describe it). Pretty much codex/claude running on a VPS with a web interface and the ability to actually build and publish software / webapps etc.
It came from me sitting on the train on the way home and I had an idea pop into my head for a pebble watch app, I wanted to build it and test it there and then as I still had about 45 mins left. I know you can run codex against git repos in the cloud but I didn't want to faff with that (and last I remember the allowances for this were much less generous). It's been really fun, probably many things like this out there but it works exactly how I want it to. I plan to open source it once I've tidied things up a bit more.
Latest updates around audio processing and quality are out, I've also made a substantial addition by implementing extensions.
This allows people to hook up to M365 or Google to get desktop notifications to start the recording, it can also export to share point and stop the recording at the registered meeting end.
Was a fun process keeping the offline and online functionality completely separate, also getting validated by Microsoft for the M365 extension was a bit of a chore, but finally have the verified blue tick.
https://getsoftwarehouse.com - I'm also working on the governance layer for AI tooling that is being built by employees, there's just HTML files flying all over the place, no security, no home. So built software house as a place for these things to live, be secured, put OIDC in front etc. It's fun!
reply