GoKawiilThe 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 tradeoff 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 actual product — one where your audio never leaves your Mac, and your transcripts aren’t stored on another company’s servers.
Talat, which was built alongside Payne’s longtime friend and former colleague, Mike Franklin, is the result of Payne’s interest in the audio space. The result is a 20 MB, one-time purchase that doesn’t require you to create an account or even share analytics data back with the developers. There are no ongoing fees, either.
While some AI notetakers may have more bells and whistles, Talat offers a streamlined set of features. It captures audio from your computer’s microphone when you’re in meeting apps like Zoom, Teams, Meet, and others, and transcribes it in real time. The app tries to assign speakers in real-time, but you can reassign them as needed. You can also take notes, plus edit, delete, or split transcript segments. When the meeting finishes, a local LLM generates a summary with key points, decisions, and action items.
The notes, transcripts, and summaries are all searchable in Talat, too.
... continue reading