Trace - No-frills offline meeting transcripts with context

@denitsapenchevavaltchanova super easy! Every recording ends up on disk as a .md and a .json file so you can grep/jq/manually extract it. Key Moments live under their own key in the .json file for exactly this reason.

Here's both files from a transcript that I captured from a YouTube video

# 
Massive Surprises From Starship Flight 12!
_2026-05-26 13:10 · 1m 36s_

**Speaker 1** [00:00] Loads and loads of great diagrams and animations at the start of the stream showing the hot stage system difference, the payload area and the capabilities there. We had the alterations with the grid fin systems, Starlink magic like this, and even a neat announcement by Chun Wang from the FRAM2 mission saying that he intends to fly the first human interplanetary flyby.

> ⭐ **[00:22] Key moment:** First interplanetary flyby announced!

**Speaker 1** [00:22] That's a little far down the line of course, but the excitement with the future was dialed right up. Yes, there was so much crammed in here, but today we are focused on the flight. We've spent months following all the construction and assembly work leading to this moment. The giant flame trench, the upgraded water deluge system, all of it had finally led to this first real test. I've gotta say, to me this felt a bit more like watching flight 1 again and with everything untested together for the first full flight, it felt like anything could happen. Here we were though approaching the expected T-Zero and there was nothing left to do but cross those fingers and nervously hold my breath to see if the detonation suppression system deluge and ignition with fire up in sequence and lead to the most powerful rocket in history launching into the sky. Ignition.

> ⭐ **[01:10] Key moment:** Liftoff!

**Speaker 1** [01:20] Wow, was that incredible or what? This almost felt surreal and immediately one thing became obvious.

> ⭐ **[01:25] Key moment:** Cleared the tower

**Speaker 1** [01:25] All those Raptor 3s are belting out an unbelievably
**Speaker 1** [01:30] violent wake behind. Let's just rewind and take a closer look at this in more detail.

{
  "keyMoments" : [
    {
      "at" : 22.19532799720764,
      "note" : "First interplanetary flyby announced!"
    },
    {
      "at" : 70.8701651096344,
      "note" : "Liftoff!"
    },
    {
      "at" : 85.09528303146362,
      "note" : "Cleared the tower"
    }
  ],
  "segments" : [
    {
      "end" : 69.05999755859375,
      "speaker" : "Speaker 1",
      "start" : 0.05999999865889549,
      "text" : "Loads and loads of great diagrams and animations at the start of the stream showing the hot stage system difference, the payload area and the capabilities there. We had the alterations with the grid fin systems, Starlink magic like this, and even a neat announcement by Chun Wang from the FRAM2 mission saying that he intends to fly the first human interplanetary flyby. That's a little far down the line of course, but the excitement with the future was dialed right up. Yes, there was so much crammed in here, but today we are focused on the flight. We've spent months following all the construction and assembly work leading to this moment. The giant flame trench, the upgraded water deluge system, all of it had finally led to this first real test. I've gotta say, to me this felt a bit more like watching flight 1 again and with everything untested together for the first full flight, it felt like anything could happen. Here we were though approaching the expected T-Zero and there was nothing left to do but cross those fingers and nervously hold my breath to see if the detonation suppression system deluge and ignition with fire up in sequence and lead to the most powerful rocket in history launching into the sky. Ignition."
    },
    {
      "end" : 90.07999420166016,
      "speaker" : "Speaker 1",
      "start" : 80.87999725341797,
      "text" : "Wow, was that incredible or what? This almost felt surreal and immediately one thing became obvious. All those Raptor 3s are belting out an unbelievably"
    },
    {
      "end" : 94.97999572753906,
      "speaker" : "Speaker 2",
      "start" : 90.07999420166016,
      "text" : "violent wake behind. Let's just rewind and take a closer look at this in more detail."
    }
  ],
  "session" : {
    "endedAt" : "2026-05-26T12:12:34Z",
    "startedAt" : "2026-05-26T12:10:58Z"
  }
}

Hope that helps!

@workout097_collab Good question. The honest answer is I haven't stress-tested either engine in really noisy or heavy-overlap calls. Both Parakeet and Whisper large-v3-turbo are widely used elsewhere so there's a lot of public testing on them, but I can't tell you firsthand how they do in a busy cafe.

A decent mic makes a real difference (and helps with cross-talk from other participants, because your voice is recorded on its own track). The workflow I built Trace around is pasting the transcript into an LLM for a summary afterwards, which is surprisingly good at filling in context even when the transcript is a bit rough in places.

@ericlagarda Local vs cloud is definitely a trade-off. In my experience the on-device models aren't anywhere near as good as the frontier cloud ones, but as it stands that's the price we need to pay for privacy. I keep an eye on new releases and hope to pull in better models as they become available, but I also want Trace to stay lightweight and not chew through battery or memory, so it's a balance.

I built this around pasting the transcript into a local LLM afterwards for the summary, and many local models are very good at filling in context and figuring out what was meant, even when the raw transcript is a bit rough (I've found Gemma V4 to be pretty good at this).