Transcription is perhaps the least hyped, and most useful, feature of the AI age. As a young journalist, I dreamed of a computer that could turn recordings into text. Now we have that, and it is amazing.
Meeting assistants are not cheap or private
This tech is not just great for interviews. It is perfect for meetings. A variety of services, called meeting assistants, promise to transcribe and summarise your meetings for you. The appeal here is obvious, but these services do not come cheap or without privacy concerns.
Generally, using them means uploading a recording of your meeting to some cloud somewhere, which is not ideal for projects that require confidentiality. And the tools themselves are generally in the $10 to $20 per month range, price-wise.
Meetily is free and open source
Now, as I pointed out with transcription software, the tech for building something like a meeting assistant is open source and widely available for free. Meetily brings it all together in a simple package. Yes, the name is awful, but it uses open-source models, has a great free version, and is available on Windows and macOS. Linux users can build it from source.
Note that there is a Pro version for $10 per month, but the open-source community version is completely free to download from GitHub. Install the application and it will offer to install the models needed. These are the AI tools that do the actual work.
It captures audio from any call
Once those have downloaded, you will need to allow Meetily to record both your microphone’s sound and the system audio. That way it can capture all sides of any conversation you are in.
Then you can hit the record button any time you are in a video call. Accessing your microphone and system sound directly means Meetily is not restricted to specific videoconferencing tools. It will work with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and any other service you might come across. You can even theoretically use this for an in-person meeting, assuming your laptop’s microphone is capable of picking up sound from everyone in the room. You may want to look at an AI notetaker if you want a separate device.
The workflow is simple
During the meeting, you can watch the transcription take place nearly in real time if you want, or minimise 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 are not 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.
Upload old recordings
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 are back at your computer.
Speaker labels are missing in the free version
The free version of Meetily has a few annoying limitations. The transcript cannot tell you who said what. No speaker labels. That will be a deal-breaker for many people. I could not find a free and open-source tool that did this consistently, though.
It is great there are so many free options, and if this field is anything like dictation software, I am sure there will be even more in a few months.
