Meetily: Free, Local Meeting Transcription Without a Subscription

Meetily is a free, open-source meeting transcription tool available on Windows and macOS that runs entirely on your own machine. It captures both microphone and system audio, so it works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or any other video service without uploading your recordings to a third-party cloud. The community version is free to download from GitHub; a Pro tier adds extra features for $10 per month. For teams handling confidential projects, it is a serious alternative to the $10-to-$20 monthly subscription services that dominate this space.

What happened

Detail	Fact
App name	Meetily
Platforms	Windows, macOS (Linux: build from source)
Free version cost	$0 (download from GitHub)
Pro version cost	$10 per month
Typical competitor price	$10 to $20 per month
Models used	Open-source AI models, installed locally

Meetily pulls together open-source AI models into a single installable app. After installation it prompts you to download the AI models it needs. Once those are in place, you grant it permission to record both your microphone and your computer’s system audio. That dual-capture approach is what lets it pick up every voice on a call regardless of which platform you use.

During a meeting you can watch the transcript build in near real time or minimise the window. When you stop the recording, Meetily produces a full transcript and offers an AI-generated summary. You can even give it specific instructions about which points to prioritise in that summary.

What the free version cannot do

The biggest gap is speaker labels. The free version produces a flat transcript with no indication of who said what, which will rule it out for anyone who needs clear attribution in their notes. According to Wired’s review, no free open-source tool handles this consistently.

A beta feature does allow you to drag an existing audio or video file into the app and generate a transcript from it, which is useful if you recorded an in-person conversation on your phone and want to process it later at your desk.

How does Meetily compare to the alternatives?

Tool	Cost	Speaker labels	Real-time recording	Account required
Meetily (free)	$0	No	Yes	No
Meetily Pro	$10/month	Not specified	Yes	Yes
noScribe	Free	Yes	No (files only)	No
Anarlog (formerly Hyprnote)	Not specified	Not specified	Yes	Not specified
Quill	Free local transcription	Not specified	Not specified	Yes

noScribe is the strongest free rival if you need speaker identification, though it only processes pre-recorded files. Anarlog supports more AI models and has a polished interface but requires more setup effort. Quill forces account creation, which undercuts the privacy argument for running things locally.

Why it matters

Most meeting transcription services sit between $10 and $20 a month and send your audio to a remote server. For businesses handling anything sensitive, that is a real risk. A tool that processes everything on the local machine removes that exposure entirely.

The privacy angle also matters for regulated industries. If your meetings touch on legal, financial, or medical content, pushing recordings to a third-party cloud may conflict with your compliance obligations. Local processing sidesteps that problem without requiring a custom build.

For teams already exploring AI integration across their workflows, local transcription is a low-risk starting point. There is no API key to manage, no vendor relationship to audit, and the cost floor is zero.

Our take

Meetily is genuinely useful for solo operators or small teams who want to stop paying a monthly fee just to keep notes. The lack of speaker labels in the free tier is a real limitation for anything more than a two-person call, but noScribe fills that gap if you are willing to record first and transcribe later.

What stands out is that the underlying technology is entirely open source. That means the tool can improve quickly and forks will appear. As Wired notes, if this space follows the same path as dictation software, options will multiply over the coming months.

We would not recommend relying solely on an AI summary for anything where the exact wording matters. Use the transcript as a reference and write your own notes. The summary is a starting point, not a record.

If you are thinking about broader meeting and communication workflows, our coverage of OpenAI’s acquisition of presentation startup NextSlide is worth a read alongside this, as the same “AI handles the output” pattern is spreading fast across office tools.

What to do about it

1. Download Meetily from GitHub and install the bundled AI models on a test machine before using it on real client calls.
2. Grant microphone and system audio permissions, then run a short test recording on a Zoom or Teams call to verify both audio streams are captured.
3. Check the transcript quality against your own notes for a few meetings before relying on it as a sole record.
4. If speaker labels are essential, pair Meetily with noScribe by exporting the audio file after each call and processing it separately.
5. Revisit the Pro tier ($10/month) once the feature set is clearer, particularly if speaker detection is added.

The free version is worth installing today, even if you only use it as a backup transcript while you take your own notes.

Source: WIRED · AI