Free App Meetily Transcribes and Summarises Your Meetings Without Sending Data to the Cloud
Most AI meeting tools cost $10 to $20 a month and upload your conversations to someone else's servers. Meetily runs entirely on your own computer, for free, using open-source AI models.
Key points
- Meetily is a free, open-source meeting transcription app available for Windows and macOS as of mid-2025.
- It runs AI models locally on your own computer, meaning your recordings never travel to an outside server.
- A paid Pro tier costs $10 per month and adds extra features, but the free version handles real-time transcription and AI summaries.
- The free version doesn't label who said what, a real gap for anyone recording multi-person calls.
- Free alternatives include noScribe and Anarlog (formerly Hyprnote), each with distinct trade-offs.
Meeting transcription has become one of the quieter success stories of the AI era. Services like Otter.ai and Fireflies record your Zoom call, turn speech into text, and produce a tidy summary. They work well. But they typically cost between $10 and $20 a month, and they all handle your audio the same way: sending it to cloud servers, computing infrastructure run by a third-party company somewhere on the internet.
For anything confidential, a client meeting or sensitive internal business, that's a real concern. Meetily, first reported by Wired AI, tries to solve both the cost and privacy problems at once. We covered the consent side of this territory on 5 August 2026 when Wispr Flow added a meeting notetaker with its own legal caveats.
What does Meetily actually do?
It transcribes your meetings in near real time and produces an AI summary, all without your audio leaving your laptop. During setup, the app downloads the AI models it needs, small software packages handling speech-to-text and summarisation, directly onto your machine.
Because it taps your microphone and your computer's system audio (the sound your speakers produce), it captures every voice in a call. That means it works with Zoom, Google Meet, or any other video call service without a special integration. You can watch the transcript appear as the meeting runs, or minimise the window and check it afterwards. When you stop recording, you can ask the app to summarize the conversation and tell it which topics matter most.
A beta feature lets you drop in a pre-recorded audio or video file and get a transcript the same way, useful if you recorded an in-person meeting on your phone.
What are the catches?
Several real ones. The free version produces no speaker labels, so the transcript won't tell you who said which line. For a solo voice memo that's manageable. A six-person project meeting is a different matter entirely.
The app also needs enough processing power to run AI models locally, which means older machines may struggle. And you'll read glowing accounts from people whose setups worked smoothly. Your experience depends on your hardware and your patience for settings.
How does it compare to the alternatives?
| Tool | Price | Speaker labels | Real-time recording | Needs account |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meetily (free) | Free | No | Yes | No |
| Meetily Pro | $10/month | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| noScribe | Free | Yes | No (files only) | No |
| Anarlog (Hyprnote) | Free tier | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Quill | Free tier | Unclear | Yes | Yes (required) |
NoScribe identifies speakers but only works on files you've already recorded. Anarlog has a cleaner interface but takes more effort to set up. Quill requires an account, which undercuts the whole point of keeping data off external servers.
Honestly, the speaker-label gap is the one to watch. It's the difference between a useful rough draft and something you can actually share with a team.
Common questions
Is my data private if I use Meetily?
Yes, provided you use the free, open-source version. All processing happens on your own computer, so your audio and transcripts never reach an outside company's servers.
Do I need to be technical to install it?
No. You download the app, it offers to install the AI models it needs, and you grant microphone access. Setup is similar to installing any standard desktop application.
Can it replace a professional transcription service?
For rough notes and quick summaries, yes. Treat the output as a first draft for anything where accuracy is legally important.
