Meetily Allows You to Transcribe and Summarize Meetings Free of Subscription—Here’s How It Works

During the meeting, you can view the transcription occurring in near real-time if you’d like, or minimize the window to concentrate on the discussion. Once the meeting concludes, you can press the stop button to access the transcription. From there, you can request an AI summary and customize which points you want to emphasize.

However, as with any AI tools, there are limitations. These systems may not be flawless and might not share your priorities. I plan to draft my own meeting minutes using the transcript as a reference, but the meeting summary might still be beneficial in certain situations.

A beta feature enables you to use Meetily with previously recorded sessions. You can simply drag an audio or video file to receive a transcript and summary. This is particularly handy if you recorded an in-person discussion on your phone and wish to obtain the transcript later on your computer.

Photograph: Justin Pot

The free version of Meetily comes with some frustrating limitations. For instance, it doesn’t identify who said what—lacking speaker labels—which may be a deal-breaker for many users. I wasn’t able to find a consistently effective free and open-source tool that provides this functionality.

If Meetily doesn’t suit your needs, there are a few alternative tools available. For example, noScribe is a completely free tool that can identify speakers, though it lacks real-time meeting recording capabilities (it only converts existing files). Anarlog (previously known as Hyprnote) boasts a more sophisticated user interface and access to various AI models, but its setup can be somewhat cumbersome compared to Meetily. Quill offers free local transcriptions but requires account registration, which undermines the point of being an offline tool, along with considerable upselling.

It’s encouraging to see so many free options available, and if the landscape evolves like dictation software has, I anticipate even more will emerge in the near future.