It's perhaps the least hyped, and most useful, feature of the AI age: transcription. As a young journalist, I dreamed of a computer that could turn recordings into text. Now we have that, and it's amazing. This tech isn't just great for interviews—it’s perfect for meetings.

A variety of services promise to transcribe and summarise your meetings for you. The appeal here is obvious, but these services don’t come cheap or without privacy concerns. Generally, using them means uploading a recording of your meeting to some cloud somewhere, which isn't ideal for projects that require confidentiality. And the tools themselves are generally in the £10 to £20 per month range.

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).

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. 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’re in.

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.