Category Archives: Hacks

The Art of Eavesdropping: A Guide to Recording & Transcribing Meetings

man working from home during a Zoom meeting. He wears a headset and sits at a desk with a laptop open in front of him. Display a blurred home office background. Include a summary of the meeting as a text box or virtual sticky note.

Are you tired of missing important details during meetings because you’re too busy speaking or taking notes? Do you wish you could record and transcribe your meetings without anyone noticing? You’re not alone! Many of us have been in this situation before, especially when we’re in a meeting and can’t take notes because we’re one of the speakers.

Problem

However, recording and transcribing meetings can be a hassle, especially when we’re using platforms like Zoom, Teams, or Slack. These tools allow us to discuss with many people, but they don’t always let us record without anyone noticing.

Solution

In this article, we’ll show you a simple and effective way to make a transcript of your meetings without breaking a sweat. We’ll use a few powerful tools to help you record and transcribe your meetings without anyone noticing.

Step 1: Setup Your Virtual Audio Source

To start, you need to download Blackhole a powerful tool that can merge and aggregate multiple sources into one single virtual source. Once installed (2 channels or 16 channels), you can see how to merge with this tutorial to Route Mic and System Audio.

Step 1: Record Your Meeting

We’ll use a tool called Voice Memo on Mac to record our meeting. This tool allows us to record our voice and audio from our headset + the output of your meeting tool (Zoom, Microsoft Tools, Google Meet).

Step 3: Use Aiko to Transcribe Your File

Once we’ve recorded our meeting, we’ll use Aiko to transcribe our file. Aiko is a AI powerful tool that can detect the language and translate it into a transcript. There is another similar tool Open Source called Vibe that does exactly the same.

Step 4: Make A Summary Of Your Transcript

Finally, let’s make a full summary in bullet point style with your favorite AI tool. I personally use Jan.ai which is quite handy for those kind of task. At that time of writing, Llama 3 8B Q4 is my favorite model.

Here is an example of prompt like for the summary:

Can you make a summary of this transcript in a bullet point style: {TRANSCRIPT}

Conclusion:

By following these simple steps, you’ll be able to record and transcribe your meetings without breaking a sweat and without anyone to notice it. Be kind and ask for permission as it’s not legal to record without asking consent. If it’s for your own use it might be okay but it’s a valid proof from a legal perspective.
You’ll never miss important details again, and you’ll be able to stay focused on the discussion. So, let’s get started and make transcription a breeze!

Benefits:

  • Record and transcribe your meetings without anyone noticing
  • Stay focused on the discussion and never miss important details
  • Use powerful tools to make transcription a breeze
  • Increase your productivity and efficiency
  • Improve your meeting notes and follow-up
  • Make a summary of it through your favorite AI tool

By using these tools and following these steps, you’ll be able to make transcription a breeze and stay on top of your meetings. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started and make transcription a part of your daily routine!

Next time, the idea would be to automatize all this process with FlowiseAI or Dify.ai and then published it automatically on my OneDrive while having the possibility to search through all the content with a RAG.

Please share in comments your thoughts and way you are building your day-to-day process.

Ad blocker for all your devices everywhere with Pi-Hole + WireGuard

PiHole + Unbound + WireGuard on Raspberry Pi

On my previous article I’ve been disabling my ad-blocker to feel like a vanilla user with no experience at all in using a computer and it was a catastrophe experience on a vast majority of websites I was browsing.

Instead of a simple extension on your browser which will use computing resources, slow page rendering, you can go to a more radical way with Pi-Hole.

PiHole powerful DNS server for filtering your network

This will cost you at most 50 € with a Raspberry Pi 3 for a lifetime efficient ad/social/whatever you want blocker!

Pi-Hole is a network wide ad blocking application that filter all the traffic from your network and delivers it through a DNS server. So instead of taking some heavy resources on your computer with a browser ad blocker like uBlock Origin or LuLu as a blocker for computer wise network filtering, you get it on your full network! How handy!

What are the pros:

  • Full network filtering: which means that all your devices at home will be filtered. Even if some friends and family joins
  • Increase Internet speed: yep! True and verified. As you’ll cut all trackers/ads/and other unwanted traffic, your pages will load at least 2 times faster on most cases. You can even do some page loading comparison to check. Make sure you are connected to a 1 Gb/s Ethernet cable for optimum speed
  • Mobile through VPN: you can filter your traffic as well on your other devices that supports VPN’s. This will enable you to move with your filtering rules everywhere you go.

The couple Pi-Hole + WireGuard (VPN) is a great combination to keep battery usage low on your mobile phones while being connected to your PiHole.

Quick list of tutorials about PiHole and WireGuard setup:

Download songs from Spotify with your premium account

Get ready to download some songs with your Premium account

Digging the abyss

As usual, digging on the web bring me on an interesting project called justifyx. This small java application let you do a simple thing:

Download any SpotifyURI link you want in 320kbps OGG format!

How to download playlist/album/song or whatever SpotifyURI?

Simply download the last version of Justifyx: https://code.google.com/p/justifyx/downloads/list

And use it as follow:

Command line:
java -jar justifyx.jar user password SpotifyURI format command

Format:
    ogg_96:  Ogg Vorbis @ 96kbps
    ogg_160: Ogg Vorbis @ 160kbps
    ogg_320: Ogg Vorbis @ 320kbps
    mp3_320: MP3 @ 320kbps

Command:
    download: downloads track/list/album
    download number: downloads an album starting on the specified track number
    cover: downloads album cover