
Show HN: We built a simple video-call summarizer for macOS - Erazal
https://get-spoke.com/
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Erazal
During the confinement, as we spent our lives on video-conferences which we
all had to attend although most of us were not active participants, but
required "information attendees", we set out to build a video-call summarizer
for MacOS.

The goal was to summarize video conversations, save, and share them with our
team easily. So we set out to build a tool to capture video-conversation
moments, upload them, run Text-To-Speech solutions on them, and then provide a
simple "video editing by text editing" interface to clean and share the videos
in a few minutes.

We started by building the video recorder itself in Swift, with AVFondation.
Swift has all the wanted features of a modern language, but XCode just ruins
it. On top of that, the documentation of AVFondation has up to almost no
documentation when you implement something out of the ordinary (for instance
the function to choose the format of video recordings takes a dictionary where
99% of the values lead to a crash).

So to mitigate this issue, we now use ffmpeg to convert the movs created by
AVFondation to a good audio and video format for the web and audio-analysis.

On the web side of things, we started out by using Python / Django. Frustrated
by Django's monolith and poor documentation, we switched to Rust with Rocket,
overcoming our fears of lack of maturity. Rocket has just the right level of
abstraction, everything being explicit, with a lot of procedural macros to
reduce the boilerplate. One limitation we however encountered was that Rocket
does not handle well hanging connections, which can be very problematic when
uploading videos. This ended up blocking all the threads if the user's
connection was reset during an upload, so we had to put Nginx ahead of Rocket.

A few months after starting the journey of building Spoke we just launched
version 1.0. If you're also bored by attending useless video-conference calls
when somebody could've just sent you a summary, feel free to check it out.

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kprimice
Very interesting concept. I always find it surprising that people run online
meeting as they would run off-line ones.

I think you are onto something, video-call summarizer + transcription will
make off-line call so obsolete that they probably won't exist anymore in a few
years.

