Transcription might be the quietest triumph of the AI era, and it’s finally good enough to trust with your meetings. The catch with most meeting assistants is the fine print: they upload your recordings to some faraway cloud and charge you $10 to $20 a month for the privilege. Meetily takes the opposite approach — it’s free, open source, and everything happens on your own machine.
Built by Zackriya Solutions and launched back in December 2024, Meetily has quietly built a following, racking up more than 11,000 GitHub stars and over 88,000 downloads. The Community Edition ships under an MIT license and costs nothing. There’s a Pro tier at US$10/user/month billed annually (early bird pricing; the regular rate is US$25), but the free version does the real work.
The heart of the appeal is privacy. Transcription runs 100% locally using Whisper or Parakeet models on your own hardware, and your audio never leaves the device. The app is built on Tauri and Rust, and runs on macOS and Windows — Linux users can build from source. After installation, Meetily offers to download the AI models it needs, then asks for permission to capture both your microphone and system audio so it can hear every side of a conversation.
Because it taps into your mic and system sound directly rather than hooking into a specific app, Meetily isn’t fussy about where your call lives. Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams — it doesn’t care. Hit record, and you can watch the transcript scroll by in near real time or minimize the window and actually pay attention to your meeting. When you’re done, stop the recording and ask for an AI summary, complete with instructions on which points to prioritize.
There’s also a beta feature for previously recorded files: drag in an audio or video clip and Meetily will spit out a transcript and summary. Handy if you captured an in-person chat on your phone and want to process it later at your desk.
It isn’t flawless. As with any AI tool, summaries reflect the model’s priorities, not necessarily yours — treating them as a guide for your own notes is the sensible move. The bigger limitation in the free version is the lack of speaker labels: the transcript won’t tell you who said what, which is a genuine deal-breaker for some. Finding a free, open-source tool that does this reliably remains surprisingly hard.
If Meetily doesn’t click, alternatives exist. noScribe is free and can identify speakers, but only converts files rather than recording live. Anarlog (formerly Hyprnote) has a slicker interface and broader model access, though setup is fiddlier. Quill offers free local transcription but demands an account, which rather undercuts the offline pitch.
The name is admittedly awful. But for anyone who wants meeting transcripts without a subscription or a privacy hangover, Meetily is one of the strongest free options going — and the field is only getting more crowded.
