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Comment by dSebastien

3 months ago

I'm going to test this with Voice AI to see how it works compared to Whisper and Parakeet

https://voice-ai.knowii.net

looks like a paid and closed source fork of the free and open source project Handy: https://github.com/cjpais/Handy

can't say for sure, but a lot of the UI (and text) is quite familiar. the history page is a near rip off which is a giveaway.

i believe the mit license should be distributed since it's almost certainly a derivative work.

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

I can't confirm if the license is infact distributed, since I would have to pay $50, which quite frankly I'm not going to do.

a bit sad to see a ui reskin claimed as original work. the reskin is totally fine, but I believe the license must be distributed. i believe in the proliferation of this software so im happy to see this overall (it's good enough someone wants to charge for it! that's a big win!) but it's just a bit of a shame how this project has gone about it imo.

  • I thought it looked familiar! Looks like they only changed some of the UI/colors lol.

    • This is not the case. I've implemented many things differently.

      The core of the transcription process is mostly the same and uses the same libraries, but I've rebuilt the UI from scratch to be fully responsive, added support for Wayland/Hyprland (with adaptive window size), implemented lazy loading/filtering/group by date/editing/search/filtering etc to the history screen, implemented history storage/handling differently, added more control over the history feature, added support for custom sounds, improved UX around managing sounds, added a loading screen, added support for model download pause/resume/cancel/delete etc.

      These might seem like details, but it all takes time. I started this project 3 weeks ago and this is just the beginning.

      In my roadmap I've listed many ideas I have in mind and will be focusing on: https://docs.voice-ai.knowii.net/roadmap

      I want to go in a different direction than Handy, and my customers (who are mainly interested in Knowledge Management) too.

  • I never claimed this was fully original work. My project indeed started as a fork of Handy. I've discussed this here: https://github.com/DeveloPassion/knowii-voice-ai-docs/issues... and https://www.knowii.net/c/announcements/knowii-voice-ai. I also mentioned it in the user documentation (FAQ page) and About page within the app.

    I am trying to approach this will full transparency, honesty and respect for what the creator of Handy did. I'm not a grifter.

    Please consider that my project is still very young. I didn't include the third-party licenses in my first few releases (I honestly didn't know this about the MIT license, my bad!), but will fix this asap with the next release (hopefully coming out in a few days), and I'll pull the previous releases to avoid distributing versions that don't include the licenses. I'll also add information about the other production dependencies that I'm using.

    If you look at my announcement, you'll see that I'm being fully transparent about this and am not interested in cloning Handy at all. My code is already very distant from the initial version I started with and I'm exploring and building features that will probably never be included in Handy. For instance, my app's UI has been created from scratch (with a lot of inspiration from Handy), it is fully responsive and now works on Omarchy (Hyprland/Wayland), which Handy doesn't support at the moment. I have added various features for my own needs and for my first customers (e.g., . In the roadmap of the product, you can see some of the ideas I intend to develop.

    I also intend to contribute back to Handy over time. I already have and will continue to do so.