Peanut Gallery

AI writers' room for YouTube. 4 personas react live — fact-checker, troll, sound guy, comedy writer. Howard or TWiST pack.

Peanut Gallery turns any YouTube video into a live show with 4 AI personas watching alongside you — a fact-checker, a sound effects guy, a comedy writer, and a cynical troll. They react in real-time in a native Chrome side panel, next to the video. No tab switching. No screen-share picker. Audio captured silently while you watch. Inspired by the Howard Stern Show staff. THE CAST - Baba Booey — fact-checker. Mid-show corrections and background data on every claim. Searches the web via Brave Search to verify stats, dates, and attributions. - Fred Norris — sound effects guy. Well-timed cues and the occasional razor-sharp aside. - Jackie Martling — comedy writer. Setup-punchline jokes, callbacks, observational humor. - The Cynical Troll — contrarian commentator, 120ms response time. Says what the chat is thinking. HOW IT WORKS 1. Install. Click the peanut icon on any YouTube tab — a native Chrome side panel opens. 2. Enter your API keys (Deepgram, Groq, and optionally Anthropic and Brave Search). Keys are stored locally in your browser and sent only to the providers you configure. 3. Click Start Listening. Tab audio is captured silently via chrome.tabCapture — the same API used by Otter.ai, Fireflies, and Recall.ai. No permission picker, no interference with playback. You hear the video; the AI hears it too. 4. Responses stream back token-by-token and appear in the side panel alongside a live transcript. PRIVACY-FIRST BY DESIGN - Your API keys live in chrome.storage.local on your machine and are passed directly to the providers — never logged, never persisted. - Audio is transcribed in real-time and discarded. No session is written to disk. - No user accounts. Nothing to sign up for. - For full privacy: Peanut Gallery is MIT-licensed open source. Run the server yourself with `npm run dev` and point the extension at localhost. Your audio never leaves your machine except to the AI providers you choose. COST Approximately $1.15 per 2-hour episode across all four providers at current rates. No subscription, no middleman — you pay the providers directly. LINKS - Source code + setup: https://github.com/Sethmr/peanut.gallery - Hosted reference web app: https://peanutgallery.live - Privacy policy: https://peanutgallery.live/privacy BUILT FOR The $5,000 This Week in Startups bounty from @jason and @lonharris. Ship it. @TWiStartups.