Yogurt is an open-source Granola alternative that keeps meetings on your laptop

A sales team running Granola sends every call to a vendor's cloud model. The transcript then lives on that vendor's servers for as long as they decide to keep it. Yogurt is the same job, done on the laptop.

Frigade pushed the repository to GitHub on 10 November. The Show HN thread reached 61 points this afternoon. The project had 146 stars at the time of writing, less than a day after launch. It is MIT-licensed. The source lives at github.com/FrigadeHQ/yogurt.

What it does

Yogurt records a call from your microphone and your system audio at the same time. It hears both sides without joining the meeting as a bot. The app transcribes the audio with a Whisper model. It writes a summary beside your own typed notes. You can ask questions about the meeting later.

The help page says audio, transcripts and notes are processed on the computer. No meeting is uploaded. There is no telemetry.

The app runs on macOS 14.4 or later on Apple Silicon. On Windows, it needs version 2004 or later on x64. On Linux, it needs x64 and Ubuntu 22.04 or a similar newer system. Every supported machine needs at least 8 GB of memory. The Windows installer is not signed yet. The operating system shows a warning the first time you run it.

What it downloads

Yogurt pulls its speech and language models from Hugging Face on first run. Frigade says it downloads a smaller notes model to start. It then keeps downloading a larger one in the background. The best model can be large. The help page says it is about 14 GB on a Mac with 64 GB of memory. It is about 63 GB on a Mac with 96 GB or more. Windows and Linux also check whether the computer can keep up with transcription. They stop setup if it cannot.

The MCP piece

Settings has an AI apps section that turns on a local MCP server. Add that server to Claude Code, Codex or any other MCP client. The agent can then read your meetings, notes and transcripts. Yogurt says the server cannot change them. The access is off by default. Turning it off stops further reads at once. The help text notes that a connected app may send what it reads to its own cloud model.

Where this sits

Granola is the paid product most of these comparisons will start from. Granola sends call audio to its own servers for transcription and summary. Yogurt takes the opposite trade. The cost is a slower first run. The cost is also a few tens of gigabytes of disk. Every meeting stays on the device. Some teams cannot send client calls to a third party. For them, the local shape is often the only shape they can use.

What a reader does on Monday

Someone testing this installs Yogurt from the Releases page on GitHub. Let the first-run download finish. Record one call. Compare the transcript and the summary against what a paid service would produce for the same meeting. The question is whether the result is close enough. The trade is the privacy and the open source against the disk space.

Source

FrigadeHQ/yogurt on GitHub, with the full help page at docs/README.md. Show HN thread for Yogurt.