During the meeting, you can watch the transcription take place nearly in real time if you want, or minimize the window and focus on your meeting. When the meeting is done, you can click the stop button, at which point you will see a transcription. From here, you can ask for an AI summary. You can even provide instructions about which points to focus on.

Now, as with all AI tools, there are caveats. These systems aren’t perfect, and they may not have the same priorities as you. I intend to write my own meeting minutes using the transcript as a guide, but the meeting summary could still prove useful in certain contexts.

A beta feature allows you to use Meetily with recordings you made previously. This means you can drag an audio or even video file and get a transcript and summary. This is useful if you recorded an in-person conversation on your phone, for example, and want to get a transcript when you’re back at your computer.

Photograph: Justin Pot

The free version of Meetily has a few annoying limitations. The transcript can’t tell you who said what—no speaker labels—which will be a deal-breaker for many people. I could not find a free and open-source tool that did this consistently, though.

There are a few other similar tools out there if Meetily doesn’t work for you. For example, noScribe is a completely free tool that can identify speakers, though it can’t record meetings in real time (it only converts files). Anarlog (formerly known as Hyprnote) has an arguably sleeker user interface and access to many AI models, but setup was a bit fiddly compared to Meetily. Quill offers free local transcriptions, but you’ll need to sign up for an account to use it (which defeats the point of an offline tool), and there’s a lot of upselling.

It’s great there are so many free options, and if this field is anything like dictation software, I’m sure there will be even more in a few months.