Alt
Free, unlimited local AI notetaker for lectures & meetings
58 followers
Free, unlimited local AI notetaker for lectures & meetings
58 followers
Most AI notetakers limit you to ~300min/month. As a student with 60+ hours of lectures, that wasn't enough. So I built Alt. It runs local AI models on your Mac for unlimited, free, private transcription. Optimized for the Apple Neural Engine, it uses minimal battery and needs no internet. Now supporting 100+ languages and optional Pro access to SOTA models like GPT-5.1 & Gemini 3 for advanced summaries.
Hey Product Hunt! 👋
I’m Coby, a CS university student in South Korea.
I built Alt because I was broke and frustrated. I used to use popular AI notetaker services to transcribe my lectures, but I’d burn through their monthly "Pro" credits in just 3-4 classes. They usually cap you at 300 minutes, but as a student, I had 60+ hours of lectures a month.
That led me down a rabbit hole of trying to run Whisper models locally on my Mac. Naturally, I thought building an app around it would be easy. (Spoiler: It wasn’t. 😅)
I spent months fighting with memory usage and battery drain, even spinning off an open-source project in the process just to get the ASR pipeline fast enough. (It got 300+ stars on Github!)
The result is Alt.
Unlike other tools, the core transcription engine runs locally on your device.
Unlimited Transcription: Since it uses your hardware, there are no hourly limits.
100% Free Tier: The local transcription will always be free.
Supports 100 languages and translation.
Privacy First: Your audio doesn't need to leave your laptop.
Battery Efficient: Optimized for macOS and Apple Silicon (ANE support).
Study Harder, Not Longer: Includes AI Chat, PDF summary, Quiz generator, and AI Notes Assistant.
I’ve already seen 3,000+ downloads during the soft launch on Reddit, and today I’m thrilled to share it with the Product Hunt community.
I really hope this makes life easier for other students and professionals who are tired of hitting credit limits.
I would love to hear your feedback. What features should we add next? Please let us know in the comments below!
Best,
Coby, Andrew
Alt team
is this all free?
@dannylee6 Yes! The reason it can be free is because it runs all the transcription on your computer 😁
Wow impressive accuracy in German! What model size are you using?
@miny_1118 We are using the large version of Whisper. We had a really hard time getting it running on MacOS with minimal memory & battery usage 😅
Snapdeck
As someone with tons of lectures, this is exactly what I needed!!
@doyeon_616 thanks for saying that. That's exactly it. 😉
Solid product. Been using since beta days, and honestly, haven't found anything better.
Best recognition I've seen, and I can't believe the free version gets that good.
However, it REALLY shines if you're bilingual and/or your team is bilingual. No other notetaker app that I've seen on the market to date can handle language switching.
Gets technical terms correct as well, which I've seen other paid models struggle with.
My only qualm is this wasn't released sooner.
Five stars.
@johnathan_lee1 Thanks so much for noticing! The reason we started this project in the first place was the non-existent support for Korean-English transcriptions 😭
Snapdeck
I was getting tired of doing everything fully online, but being able to record anytime, anywhere is actually sick. I use it all the time lol.
@bigmacfive appreciate it man. I also got super tired of relying on online stuff all the time, so hearing this hits. Glad it's been useful for you.
If anything feels off or you want something added, just tell me. I'm building this in the open anyway.
It's nice that it works offline but does it handle stuff that needs an internet connection too? Like web searches, for example?
@zi_woo Alt runs all core features offline, but if you don't want to install heavy local LLMs, it also offers an option to use LLM APIs instead :)