Alt - AI Lecture Notetaker
Key Points
- 1Alt is a real-time, local AI lecture note-taking app for macOS, designed to transcribe and summarize spoken content directly on the user's device.
- 2Developed by KAIST students to address the limitations of existing AI note-takers, it prioritizes user security by storing all data locally and supports 100 languages with real-time translation.
- 3This high-performance application is offered completely free of charge, leveraging a server-less, API-cost-free model to provide an accessible study tool for university students.
Alt (AI Lecture NoteTaker) is a lecture note-taking application designed for macOS 13.3+ with Apple Silicon, developed by a KAIST student. Its core functionality involves real-time transcription of spoken lecture content and subsequent summarization of key points, all executed entirely on the user's local device without relying on external servers or API calls.
The application's methodology centers on on-device AI processing. A dedicated speech-to-text (STT) model runs locally on the user's Apple Silicon-powered Mac, converting live audio input from lectures into textual notes in real-time. Following transcription, another local AI component processes this transcribed text to identify and summarize core information, effectively condensing lecture content. This local execution paradigm ensures several key advantages:
- Privacy and Security: All data, including transcribed notes and summaries, remains exclusively on the user's PC, preventing any transmission to external servers. This eliminates privacy concerns associated with cloud-based AI services.
- Cost-Effectiveness: By removing the dependency on server infrastructure and third-party API services, the application incurs no operational costs for the developers, enabling its free provision to users for an unlimited duration ("10,000 hours free").
- Offline Capability: The absence of server-side processing means the application functions entirely offline, requiring no internet connection for its core features.
- Performance Optimization: The development prioritizes high AI performance while minimizing resource consumption. Leveraging Apple Silicon's neural engine capabilities, the local AI models are optimized for low memory usage and reduced battery drain, making them suitable for extended use during lectures.
- Multilingual Support: The application supports real-time transcription and processing across 100 languages, including robust Korean language support, which was a specific pain point the developer aimed to address with existing global free applications.
The motivation for Alt's development stemmed from the developer's personal experience and dissatisfaction with existing AI note-taking solutions, which often imposed usage limits, lacked sufficient Korean language support, or relied on cloud services with associated privacy concerns and costs. The development process presented challenges, particularly in optimizing AI model performance for local execution while maintaining minimal memory footprint and power consumption. The application also includes real-time translation capabilities and is designed to seamlessly function with online classes. It is provided completely free of charge, reflecting the developer's intent to offer an accessible and effective tool for university students.