Should you build your own Hedy?
Listens to your meetings, classes and calls live and feeds you suggested questions, context and notes while they are still happening.
The pieces are all commodity now: capture audio, stream it through a local Whisper variant, keep a rolling transcript, and every few seconds ask a model for the next good question. An agent will get you that in one sitting on a laptop, and the transcript-plus-summary half will genuinely be fine. What it will not get you is a phone in your pocket that survives being backgrounded during a two hour lecture, or sub-second suggestions that arrive before the moment passes. Live assistance is a latency and UX problem more than an AI problem, and that is exactly the part that takes weeks of fiddling. Build it if you mostly sit at a desk; keep paying if you mostly do not.
ENOriginal research content in English. Original prompt preserved in English.
Build a local desktop meeting copilot. Stack: Python 3.11, FastAPI backend, a single HTML page with vanilla JS and a WebSocket, no build step. Run everything on localhost, no accounts, no telemetry, no cloud storage.
Audio capture: use sounddevice to record from a selectable input device at 16kHz mono. Document in the README that capturing the other side of a call requires a loopback device (BlackHole on macOS, a WASAPI loopback device on Windows) and let the user pick it from a dropdown of available inputs. Optionally mix two devices (mic plus loopback) into one stream.
Transcription: faster-whisper with the small.en model by default, configurable via .env. Process audio in 5 second chunks with a 1 second overlap, maintain a rolling transcript in memory, and push each new segment to the browser over the WebSocket with a timestamp.
Assistance loop: every 15 seconds, or on a manual "nudge" button, send the last 2000 characters of transcript plus a short session brief the user typed at the start to an LLM via the OpenAI-compatible API. Key comes from OPENAI_API_KEY in .env. Ask for exactly three things in JSON: two suggested questions to ask next, one factual note or definition worth knowing, and one line of what seems to be at stake. Render these as cards in a right-hand panel, newest on top, with the old ones dimmed rather than deleted.
Session end: on stop, write the full transcript and all generated cards to ./sessions/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.md, then make one final call for a summary with action items appended at the top of that file.
UI: two columns. Left is the live transcript, auto-scrolling, with a pause button. Right is the assistance cards. A header with device picker, session brief field, start/stop, and a visible recording indicator. Dark, dense, no animations.
In scope: local recording, streaming transcript, periodic suggestions, markdown export, session list page that greps past files.
Out of scope: mobile, speaker diarization, calendar or Zoom integration, multi-user, auth, hosted anything. Do not add them.
Ship a README with the loopback setup steps, the exact pip install line, a .env.example, and a blunt note that recording other people may require their consent where the user lives.The prompt opens pre-filled in your agent. Review it before running. · this prompt is generated from the build plan · improve it via PR
What would building your own look like?
A local desktop app that records mic and system audio, streams a rolling transcript, and every few seconds asks a model for suggested questions and notes in a side panel.
What you will need
- A laptop with a decent CPU or GPU for local Whisper, or an API key for hosted transcription
- An LLM API key in .env
- A virtual audio device (BlackHole on macOS, WASAPI loopback on Windows) to capture the other side of the call
- Consent from whoever you are recording, which is on you
Because real-time is unforgiving. A post-hoc summarizer can be sloppy and still useful, but a live copilot that lags four seconds or drops audio when you switch apps is worse than nothing, and people pay to not think about that. The mobile side compounds it: background audio on iOS is a permissions and lifecycle minefield that nobody wants to solve for themselves. Add the meeting-type presets and calendar hookups and the subscription is mostly buying tuning you would otherwise do by hand for a month.
xMobile apps that keep recording reliably when the screen is off, which is where most of these sessions actually happen
xTuned latency: your DIY suggestions arrive a beat late, and a beat late is useless in conversation
xSpeaker diarization and meeting-type presets that shape the assistant for a sales call vs a lecture vs a doctor visit
xCalendar and conferencing integrations that join and label sessions for you
xHosted, searchable history across every session with no laptop babysitting
Nothing worth pointing at. That’s why the prompt exists.
How much does Hedy cost?
- Monthly billing
- $12.99/mo$12.99/mo
- Per year
- $156/yr$156/yr
- Annual billing
- $99.96/yr36% cheaper than paying monthly
- On a Brazilian card, with 3.5% IOF
- R$67.88/moR$522/yr
Saved to My list. You will see a notice on this site when the price changes.
You complete the purchase on Hedy’s site. Vibe Radar does not handle payments.
Is it cheaper to build or buy Hedy?
Adjust the numbers: hours to build, your hourly rate, running costs and the subscription price.
Over 24 months, subscribing is cheaper.
Starting hours estimated from the analysis (a weekend). Does not price what you give up (support, integrations, security).
Can I rebuild Hedy?
Kinda. The core of Hedy is buildable in a weekend with the prompt on this page, but there are real gaps: Mobile apps that keep recording reliably when the screen is off, which is where most of these sessions actually happen, Tuned latency: your DIY suggestions arrive a beat late, and a beat late is useless in conversation. Read the honest list above before committing.
How much does Hedy cost?
Hedy costs about $12.99/mo (Pro, checked 10/20/2026), which is $99.96 per year.
What do I lose by replacing Hedy?
Honestly: Mobile apps that keep recording reliably when the screen is off, which is where most of these sessions actually happen; Tuned latency: your DIY suggestions arrive a beat late, and a beat late is useless in conversation; Speaker diarization and meeting-type presets that shape the assistant for a sales call vs a lecture vs a doctor visit; Calendar and conferencing integrations that join and label sessions for you; Hosted, searchable history across every session with no laptop babysitting. If any of those are load-bearing for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to Hedy?
No mature open-source alternative worth pointing at, which is exactly why the one-shot prompt on this page exists.