What is Meetily: AI-Powered Meeting Assistant

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What is Meetily (Meeting Minutes)?
3. Key Features of Meetily (Meeting Minutes)
4. Architecture Overview of Meetily
5. Setup and Installation of Meetily(Meeting Minutes)
6. Use Case
7. Meetily Comparison with other Meeting-taking apps
8. Conclusion

Introduction

Meetings are essential for collaboration. However, they often come with familiar pains: poor documentation, missed action items, and time-consuming follow-ups. For high-performing teams, these issues can be a significant problem.

Meetily solves this problem by providing an AI-powered meeting assistant that transforms audio or video into clear, structured minutes. Built on OpenAI's GPT and Whisper, it integrates seamlessly with popular online meeting platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams.

In this article, we will explore Meetily, its features, use cases, and more. Throughout this article., we will use Meetily and Meeting Minutes interchangeably. Meeting Minutes is a term used to refer to meetings in its Gitbub repository

What is Meetily (Meeting Minutes)?

Meetily is an open-source product that captures live meeting audio and generates professional Meeting Minutes from it. This allows the user to focus on the meeting while leaving note-taking to Meetily.

The tool is designed with privacy in mind. Unlike other tools, Meetily ensures that your data stays local to your machine unless you choose to export it.

Key Highlights:

• Automates transcription and summarization
• Supports live meetings
• 100% open source
• 100% private: All processing happens locally
• Intelligent: Built-in knowledge system for enhanced search functionality
• Low cost: You can self-host it at no cost

Key Features of Meetily (Meeting Minutes)

• Modern, Responsive UI with Real-Time Updates:Meetily offers a well-designed user interface that updates live as transcription and processing occur.
• Real-Time Audio Capture (Microphone + System Audio): You can capture both microphone and system audio in real time, making it ideal for recording meetings, calls, or any on-screen content.
• Live Transcription via Whisper.cpp: Leverage the efficiency of whisper.cpp to transcribe audio locally with speed and accuracy—no cloud services required.
• Speaker Diarization: The system can distinguish between multiple speakers, helping to structure conversations more clearly. This feature is currently in progress.
• Local Processing for Privacy: All information is processed and stored on your device, ensuring complete privacy and offline capability.
• Packaged App for macOS and Windows: Meetily supports both macOS and Windows platforms, making it accessible to a broad user base with native-like performance.
• Export to Markdown/PDF: Soon, users will be able to export their meeting content in Markdown and PDF formats. This feature is currently under development.

Architecture Overview of Meetily

The following image summarizes Meetily's architecture from a high level:

• Audio Capture Service: Meetily audio service captures audio from both video and microphone. The audio is passed through a preprocessing pipeline for clarity and consistency. This service is created using Rust and Python. The Rust version is experimental.
• Transcription Engine: Meetily's transcription engine uses Whisper.cpp to transcribe the audio locally. It takes advantage of multiple model sizes and GPU acceleration for faster processing.
• LLM Orchestrator: A unified orchestrator interface with multiple large model providers.
• Data Service: Transcriptions are stored in ChromaDB, a local vector store that enables advanced semantic operations.
• API Layer: The FastAPI backend exposes REST endpoints for uploading, processing audio, and other operations. This makes it easy to integrate Meetily into other tools or workflows. The endpoints include:
• POST /upload
• POST /process
• GET /summary/{id}
• DELETE /summary/{id}

Setup and Installation of Meetily(Meeting Minutes)

Meetily provides an easy way to get started.

1. Frontend Setup

Run Packaged Version

Visit the Releases page to download the latest release for your platform.

• For Windows:
  • Download the .exe installer or .msi package.
  • Double-click to launch the installer.
  • If Windows flags the app as untrusted, click "More info" → "Run anyway."
  • The app is now ready.
• For macOS:
  • Download and extract the .zip file.
  • Open the .dmg file.
  • Drag the app into your Applications folder.
  • Execute the following command to remove the quarantine attribute:

xattr -c /Applications/meeting-minutes-frontend.app

• • Provide the necessary permissions for audio capture and microphone access, and you are ready to go.

Dev Run

# Navigate to frontend directory
cd frontend
# Give execute permissions to clean_build.sh
chmod +x clean_build.sh
# run clean_build.sh
./clean_build.sh

2. Backend Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Zackriya-Solutions/meeting-minutes.git
cd meeting-minutes/backend
# Create and activate virtual environment
# On macOS/Linux:
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
# On Windows:
python -m venv venv
.\venv\Scripts\activate
# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Add environment file with API keys
# On macOS/Linux:
echo -e "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_api_key\nGROQ_API_KEY=your_api_key" | tee .env
# On Windows (PowerShell):
"ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_api_key`nGROQ_API_KEY=your_api_key" | Out-File -FilePath .env -Encoding utf8
# Configure environment variables for Groq
# On macOS/Linux:
export GROQ_API_KEY=your_groq_api_key
# On Windows (PowerShell):
$env:GROQ_API_KEY="your_groq_api_key"
# Build dependencies
# On macOS/Linux:
chmod +x build_whisper.sh
./build_whisper.sh
# On Windows:
.\build_whisper.bat
# Start backend servers
# On macOS/Linux:
./clean_start_backend.sh
# On Windows:
.\start_with_output.ps1

Use Case

Meetily is built to serve a wide range of users:

• Remote Team Meetings: Capture and transcribe internet calls, ensuring that each voice is captured and summarized.
• Lectures and Webinars: Capture and transcribe lectures over the internet, such as online class events.
• Client Consultations: Professionals like consultants, lawyers, and therapists can rely on Meetily for meeting transcription and structured summaries.
• Content Creators: Can use Meetily to create content from audio and video files, e.g., converting a YouTube video into a blog post.

Meetily Comparison with other Meeting-taking apps

In this section, we will compare Meetily with other popular meeting note-taking apps, such as Granola, Otter AI, Fireflies, and Fathom.

Conclusion

Meetily offers a unique solution for real-time meeting note-taking. It combines local processing, privacy, and full customizability in a way that other commercial tools do not. Meetily ensures the user remains in control by keeping their data in their hands.

Meetily is a strong competitor to other top meeting note-taking apps. By choosing Meetily, you're investing not only in a powerful transcription tool but also in the future of open-source innovation, where data privacy and transparency are prioritized.

Frequently Asked Questions