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 does not label who said what during a meeting, which is a notable gap for anyone recording multi-person calls.
- Several free alternatives exist, including noScribe and Anarlog (formerly Hyprnote), each with their own trade-offs.
Meeting transcription tools have become one of the quieter success stories of the AI era. Services like Otter.ai and Fireflies promise to record your Zoom call, turn speech into text, and spit out a tidy summary. They work well. But they typically cost between $10 and $20 a month, and they all do the same thing with your audio: send it to their servers in the cloud, a term for computing power and storage run by a third-party company somewhere on the internet.
For a casual team call, that is probably fine. For anything confidential, such as a client meeting, a medical conversation, or sensitive internal business, it is a real concern.
Meetily, first covered by Wired AI, tries to solve both problems at once.
What does Meetily actually do?
It transcribes your meetings in near real time and then produces an AI summary, all without your audio leaving your laptop. The app downloads the AI models it needs, small software packages that handle the speech-to-text and summarisation work, directly onto your machine during setup.
Because it taps into your microphone and your computer's system audio (the sound your speakers produce), it picks up every voice in a call, not just yours. That means it works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and any other video call service without needing a special integration.
You can watch the transcript appear as the meeting runs, or minimise the window and check it afterwards. When you stop the recording, you can ask the app to summarise the conversation and even 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?
A few real ones. The free version produces no speaker labels, meaning the transcript will not tell you who said which line. For a solo interview or a solo voice memo that is manageable. For a six-person project meeting, it is a genuine limitation.
The app also requires enough processing power to run AI models locally, so older or lower-spec computers may struggle.
Survivorship bias is worth naming here: you will read a lot of glowing accounts of tools like this from people whose setups worked smoothly. Your experience will depend on your hardware and your willingness to fiddle with 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 can identify speakers but only works on files you have already recorded. Anarlog has a cleaner interface but takes more effort to set up. Quill requires you to create an account, which undermines the whole point of keeping data off external servers.
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. The setup is similar to installing any standard desktop application.
Can it replace a professional transcription service?
For rough notes and quick summaries, yes. For verbatim records or anything where accuracy is legally important, treat the output as a first draft and check it yourself.
