“Crippling horse addiction” has so many meanings even in context. From heroin to animal cruelty to gambling to horse dancing. Wonderful phrase, I tip my hat to you.

As an additional note, Spellar does let you bring your own Open AI key but does not allow for purely local processing. You’ve still got to send the audio out for transcription and interpretation.

Also, I have no affiliation with Spellar, just a user.

Spellar.ai does a great job. There’s others out there for Mac but I like Spellar’s calendar integration.

Interestingly, their initial raison d’être was to help with English pronunciation and speaking speed, giving you real time feedback. They’ve downplayed this in recent releases, but the functionality is still there. Though, I’m a native English speaker and it always flagged me as pronouncing words incorrectly even though I’ve got little regional accent (I’ve been told this by others, not just my opinion. I had a speech therapist as a mother, hence little accent)

There’s not a “bot” that needs to attend the meeting and show up in the list of attendees thus giving away the recording of the call. Otter.ai, for instance, shows up as “Otter” (or another name) on a Zoom call when it is recording and taking notes.

Oh, so it is for more "seamlessly" helping people commit the crime of wiretapping in two-party consent jurisdictions, like California?

If you don't like people knowing you are recording them, you probably have a consent issue.

You could have said this exact same thing without it sounding like a personal attack, but you chose to be unkind instead. I wonder why?

Because crime is bad and I don't have to be nice to those who support criminals doing crimes. If your marketing differentiator vs all the AI recording bot products is that with your product, you can record people without them knowing you are recording them... then your business model is literally to facilitate crime in many jurisdictions, including California.

Let me be clear: if you have a bot capturing audio in a call you have with someone in California, and you do not tell that person you are recording them, then you have committed a felony, even if you are not in California.

And what is it about you that makes you so allergic to me calling this out? I wonder why....

See, I can do that too. How does that feel? We having a good conversation here?

Are you an attorney? I would be careful making such sweeping statements unless you are. A transcription is not a wiretap, it's not obvious to me that an anti-recording law would apply here. Plus, if you're on a call with coworkers, they likely already know that transcription is taking place, even if you don't explicitly say so at the start of each meeting. This is why you should be more kind - you might not know all these things.

Thanks for your comments. I wish more people had a personal policy of not putting up with those who commit or endorse crime/fraud/bullshit. The world would be a better place.

I can think of at least five reasons to use this that aren't illegal, including the fact that the law doesn't work the way this person thinks it does.

The way he phrased it has turned me from someone eager to discuss the potential uses of this into someone unwilling to engage with him to discuss it any further. Even if it turns out that he's absolutely 100% correct (he's not) I'll talk to someone else about it instead.

I suspect this person regularly has "conversations" where the other party suddenly becomes silent, and he misinterprets that as a "victory" instead of the other person deciding he isn't worth the trouble.

Whether it is actually a crime for a person in a one-party consent jurisdiction recording a call with a person in a two-party consent jurisdiction is not a consistently settled issue. At least in US courts, dunno about elsewhere.

Sometimes the courts have sided "the stricter jurisdiction's law applies" while other times the courts have sided "the law where the recording was made applies". The federal law is not any clearer, stating one party consent is the default and states can override but offering no further guidance. I suspect this will someday be addressed in the Supreme Court.

If one state could make something illegal in the other 49 Florida would have already made life very painful for the blue states.

Extraterritorial effects are usually limited in scope for this kind of concern. If I had to place a bet I'd say this is the main line of reasoning the current Supreme Court would use to side with the "the law where the recording happens" as well. I may just be advertising my biased though, as that's also the conclusion I think makes sense personally.

Until that actually gets reviewed by a higher court (or more descript higher law comes about) what each regional court concludes remains the reality for cases in that region though.

I'm not a lawyer myself, I just had to spend some time with the company's regarding this topic recently ("yay" for filling in to manage internal IT on the side).

I always ask if I can transcribe using an AI tool regardless of jurisdiction. Not sure what the other commenter’s intentions were but just throwing my two cents in.

I prefer non-bot transcription tools solely because they’re not a nuisance during the meeting — they take up valuable screen real estate and provide no input during the meeting so I’d rather them be invisible.

Should your concern lie with individuals transcribing their own conversations, or with mass surveillance and wiretapping actively being executed by a broad range of official and corporate entities without your consent?

Woah, that's a classic logical fallacy you got there, buddy. I can't be upset about A because B is related and also bad. One of the greatest of all time ways to derail an argument.

Shouldn't you be more concerned about starving children or something than my post?

See how productive of a conversation we are having when we both use these fallacies?

You're welcome to care about as many things as you desire, at the same time, friend. It's a question of perspective and relative importance. The reply didn't comment about A and B and C, only A - implying A was the most important thing to consider and discuss.

So low-code is faster to get started with little programming knowledge but isn’t expandable. OTOH, a language and framework that you’ve taken the time and effort to learn takes a little longer to get started but is ultimately more suited to more complex tasks.

I think the takeaway from the narrative here is knowing when to switch from the low code platform and call it a PoC. I’d have cut that off around the point that the custom lambda came into play. That way you’ve used the low code environment for what it’s good at, creating something “they” can react to and easily explore basic functionality. While at the same time you’re taking those learnings and building the more robust solution.

I agree that the main takeaway is knowing when to switch. Having a mental model for this makes many future discussions and decisions much easier, because this seems to be a conundrum that comes up frequently (even for me inside of a large tech organization!).

Based on my experience, I'd suggest the pivot point occurs before even starting: it should pivot around who is building and maintaining the system. If you have the experience needed to quickly develop a solution in code, do it in code. If not, because this is a non-technical team without technical resources, do it in low code. Simple as that.

I usually go straight to the full language. It's pretty hard to find the point when to switch from low code to something else when there is time pressure.

Same with bash vs python. People say you should switch from bash once you have more than 100 lines or so. But at this point you already have some complexity in bash which makes the switch to python non trivial. So you usually end up patching the bash script in small increments as needed. It gets messier and messier but nobody wants to/can spend the effort for a full conversion

Better to immediately switch to Python (or anything else) once you have any non-trivial control flow in your bash script. Loops, non-trivial conditionals, and argument parsing are all easier in Python. Bash is for simple scripts that just chain commands.

Unless you're a regular python user who has already paid the high cost of installing learning to use the whole mess of tools, the break even point exists. There are times when I do the 100+ lines of shell to avoid python. How often do python apps just stop working on me for no apparent reason? (Yesterday I tried to launch puddletag and had to nuke it and reinstall). But for me the big thing is that using "curl | jq | awk" is easy, fast and terse. If I can get away with that I'll choose it every time.

If you're using simple pipes with little control flow, bash is a great choice. Once you need something more complex, you're better off using something else. Not necessarily Python (Ruby and JS work well as replacements, too), but that would be my first choice.

For most simple scripts, Python's standard library is more than enough. File operations, JSON manipulation, HTTP requests and argument parsing are all available without external packages.

Regarding Python apps, have you tried using pipx to install them? That would eliminate most dependency problems, which usually arise from sharing the same environment (potentially including conflicting dependencies) across different apps.