Meetily offers free meeting transcripts and summaries you can run locally

In short: Meetily is a free, open-source app that can record a meeting on your computer, turn it into text, and create a summary without a monthly subscription.

What happened

Wired highlighted Meetily, a meeting transcription and summarizing tool that anyone can download for free from GitHub. “Open source” means the code is public, so others can inspect it and build on it.

Meetily runs on Windows and macOS, and Linux users can build it themselves. There is also a Pro plan that costs $10 per month, but the community version is free.

After installing, Meetily downloads the AI models it needs (the built-in “brains” that do the listening and writing). You then allow it to capture sound from your microphone and your computer’s audio, so it can hear both you and the people you are talking to.

Because it records audio directly from your system, it is not tied to one meeting app. Wired says it should work with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and others. After you stop a recording, you can view the transcript and ask for an AI summary, including instructions on what to focus on.

Why it matters

Many meeting assistants cost $10 to $20 per month and often require you to upload recordings to a company’s servers (like mailing your meeting audio to someone else’s computer). A tool that can work locally on your own machine may feel like a better fit for people who want to avoid subscriptions or limit where meeting audio is stored. Meetily still has limits, including that the free version does not reliably label who said what, which can matter in group meetings.

Source: Wired