July 7, 2026
Meeting notes or meeting mess?
Show HN: Ghostmeet – Self-hosted meeting transcription and summaries
This privacy-first meeting note tool wowed some people — and made others ask if anyone even wants this
TLDR: Ghostmeet is a free tool that writes captions and summaries for browser-based meetings while keeping the audio on your own computer. Commenters loved the privacy angle, but the big debate was whether this really stands out in an overcrowded market without better speaker tracking and broader language support.
Ghostmeet arrived with a very clean promise: turn meeting audio from a browser tab into live captions and tidy notes without shipping your private conversations off to some mystery company server. That instantly won over the privacy crowd, with one commenter basically saying, yes, finally, a meeting tool that doesn’t feel like handing your weekly one-on-one to the cloud. For anyone dealing with sensitive work chats or customer calls, that angle was the real selling point.
But this is Hacker News, so applause lasted about five seconds before the skepticism rolled in. One of the sharpest reactions was the classic “cool, but there are already a thousand of these” jab, with the commenter arguing the only way this stands out is if it can handle accents and non-English languages better than the rest. Ouch. Another commenter zeroed in on the missing feature everyone apparently wants yesterday: knowing who said what. Speaker labels are still on the roadmap, and more than one person is hovering over the repo waiting for that update like it’s the next season finale.
Then came the funniest mini-drama of all: one user bluntly asked if people even use meeting summaries at all, which is the kind of comment that can start a tech identity crisis. Another chimed in with a very real pain point: offline meetings where every voice gets lumped together as one person. So the vibe is clear: people love the privacy promise, but the comments section is already demanding this tool prove it’s more than just another meeting bot in a crowded Zoom-shaped universe.
Key Points
- •Ghostmeet captures audio from browser tabs and transcribes it locally on the user’s machine using Whisper.
- •Audio is not uploaded externally; only transcript text is sent out, and only when the user explicitly enables summarization through the Claude API.
- •The system uses a Chrome extension plus a local backend built with FastAPI and WebSocket.
- •It supports browser-based audio sources such as Google Meet, Zoom Web, Microsoft Teams Web, Discord, Around, Whereby, and recorded media, but not native Zoom or Teams desktop apps.
- •Speaker diarization is not yet available and is identified in the article as a planned future feature.