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.)

Photograph: Justin Pot

During the meeting, you can watch the transcription take place nearly in real time if you want, or minimize the window and focus on your meeting. When the meeting is done, you can click the stop button, at which point you will see a transcription. From here, you can ask for an AI summary. You can even provide instructions about which points to focus on.

Now, as with all AI tools, there are caveats. These systems aren’t perfect, and they may not have the same priorities as you. I intend to write my own meeting minutes using the transcript as a guide, but the meeting summary could still prove useful in certain contexts.

A beta feature allows you to use Meetily with recordings you made previously. This means you can drag an audio or even video file and get a transcript and summary. This is useful if you recorded an in-person conversation on your phone, for example, and want to get a transcript when you’re back at your computer.

Photograph: Justin Pot

The free version of Meetily has a few annoying limitations. The transcript can’t tell you who said what—no speaker labels—which will be a deal-breaker for many people. I could not find a free and open-source tool that did this consistently, though.

There are a few other similar tools out there if Meetily doesn’t work for you. For example, noScribe is a completely free tool that can identify speakers, though it can’t record meetings in real time (it only converts files). Anarlog (formerly known as Hyprnote) has an arguably sleeker user interface and access to many AI models, but setup was a bit fiddly compared to Meetily. Quill offers free local transcriptions, but you’ll need to sign up for an account to use it (which defeats the point of an offline tool), and there’s a lot of upselling.

It’s great there are so many free options, and if this field is anything like dictation software, I’m sure there will be even more in a few months.