Meetily Lets You Transcribe and Summarize Meetings Without a Subscription—Here’s How

It's perhaps the least hyped, and most useful, feature of the AI age: transcription. As a young journalist, I dreamed of a computer that could turn recordings into text. Now we have that, and it's amazing.

This tech isn't just great for interviews—it's perfect for meetings. A variety of services, called meeting assistants, promise to transcribe and summarize your meetings for you. The appeal here is obvious, but these services don't come cheap or without privacy concerns. Generally, using them means uploading a recording of your meeting to some cloud somewhere, which isn't ideal for projects that require confidentiality. And the tools themselves are generally in the $10 to $20 per month range, price-wise.

Now, as I pointed out with transcription software, the tech for building something like a meeting assistant is open source and widely available for free. Meetily brings it all together in a simple package. Yes, the name is awful, but it uses open-source models, has a great free version, and is available on Windows and macOS (Linux users can build it from source).

Note that there is a Pro version for $10 per month, but the open-source community version is completely free to download from GitHub. Install the application and it will offer to install the models needed. These are the AI tools that do the actual work.

Photograph: Justin Pot

Once those have downloaded, you will need to allow Meetily to record both your microphone's sound and the system audio—that way it can capture all sides of any conversation you're in.

Then you can hit the record button any time you're in a video call. Accessing your microphone and system sound directly means Meetily isn't restricted to specific videoconferencing tools—it'll work with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and any other service you might come across. You can even theoretically use this for an in-person meeting, assuming your laptop's microphone is capable of picking up sound from everyone in the room. (You may want to look at an AI notetaker if you want a separate device.)