Congrats on ur launch. Amanda has the strongest LinkedIn game I have ever seen in my life. On the other hand the product is IMHO at risk? Models like Whisper, DistilWhisper, TinyLlama, miniGPT-4, OpenHermes, Vosk, and Llama.cpp make Recall.ai meeting transcription easy to replicate. IMHO in 1 weekend you can build an open-source tech stacks that can rival or EVEN surpass the value brought....or am I tripping?
Customer here, you're tripping. Recall provides transcription as an auxiliary service, not their core value prop.
Recall is, at its core, an API for bot recording. As someone building an application that relies heavily on conversational data, recording meetings is really important. Recall makes that process as easy as an API call, standardized across various meeting platforms. It's a huge PITA to set up infrastructure to get bots to join meetings that handle each platforms' proclivities, encoding and storing video data, etc.
The transcription service is just something they do to make transcribing recordings - one of the most common first post-processing steps for any conversational data - easier and lower friction.
Amanda says thank you so much!
I actually agree that it’s become incredibly easy to transcribe conversations using open-source models, and that’s not where Recall adds the most value. The hard part is building the infrastructure that allows you to get real-time access to the raw audio, video, and transcript data directly from the meeting platforms. We abstract all of that away and provide you with a clean interface to access that data. Once you get the data, you could use any of the models that you mentioned to do your own transcription, or transcribe using Recall’s transcription models.
Ah yes, the ever popular "over a weekend" retort. So, you have a weekend coming up. I fully expect to see your Show HN on Monday. You'd know pretty quickly on your own if you were tripping or not. I'll check back with you on Monday. I'll gladly eat a bowl of something (I'm thinking ice cream) if you have a working Show HN on Monday. I'm giving you two days of prep. Or you can take the same weekend time and provide a Show HN on Saturday. Choice is yours