Meetily Lets You Transcribe and Summarize Meetings Without a Subscription—Here’s How

Meetily 让你可以无需订阅即可转录和总结会议——操作指南

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. 这或许是人工智能时代最不被大肆宣传，却又最有用的功能：语音转文字（转录）。作为一名年轻的记者，我曾梦想拥有一台能将录音转化为文本的电脑。现在我们实现了这一点，这真是太棒了。

This tech isn’t just great for interviews—it’s perfect for meetings. A variety of services, called meeting assistants, promise to transcribe and summarize 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, price-wise. 这项技术不仅适用于采访，也非常适合会议。各种被称为“会议助手”的服务承诺为你转录和总结会议内容。其吸引力显而易见，但这些服务价格不菲，且存在隐私隐患。通常，使用它们意味着要将会议录音上传到某个云端，这对于需要保密的项目来说并不理想。而且，这些工具本身的月费通常在 10 到 20 美元之间。

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). 正如我之前提到的转录软件一样，构建会议助手这类产品的技术是开源的，且可以免费获取。Meetily 将这一切整合在一个简单的软件包中。没错，这个名字确实不怎么样，但它使用了开源模型，拥有出色的免费版本，并支持 Windows 和 macOS 系统（Linux 用户可以从源码构建）。

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. 请注意，虽然有一个每月 10 美元的专业版，但开源社区版本可以从 GitHub 完全免费下载。安装该应用程序后，它会提示你安装所需的模型。这些就是执行实际工作的 AI 工具。

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. 下载完成后，你需要允许 Meetily 同时录制麦克风声音和系统音频——这样它才能捕捉到你参与的任何对话的所有发言方。

Then you can hit the record button any time you’re in a video call. Accessing your microphone and system sound directly means Meetily isn’t restricted to specific videoconferencing tools—it’ll 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.) 之后，你在进行视频通话时随时可以点击录制按钮。直接访问麦克风和系统声音意味着 Meetily 不受特定视频会议工具的限制——它适用于 Zoom、Google Meet、Microsoft Teams 以及你可能遇到的任何其他服务。理论上，你甚至可以在面对面会议中使用它，前提是你的笔记本电脑麦克风能够拾取房间内每个人的声音。（如果你想要一个独立的设备，可以考虑 AI 笔记记录仪。）

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. 会议期间，你可以选择实时查看转录过程，或者将窗口最小化以专注于会议。会议结束后，点击停止按钮，你就会看到转录文本。在此基础上，你可以要求 AI 生成摘要，甚至可以提供指令，指定需要重点关注的内容。

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. 当然，和所有 AI 工具一样，它也有局限性。这些系统并不完美，它们的侧重点可能与你不同。我打算以转录稿为参考来撰写自己的会议纪要，但在某些情况下，会议摘要仍然非常有用。

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. 一项测试版功能允许你使用 Meetily 处理之前录制的音频。这意味着你可以拖入音频甚至视频文件，并获得转录和摘要。例如，如果你在手机上录制了面对面的谈话，回到电脑前想获取转录稿，这个功能就很有用。

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. Meetily 的免费版本有一些令人烦恼的限制。转录稿无法区分是谁说的哪句话——没有发言人标签——这对许多人来说可能是个硬伤。不过，我目前还没找到能稳定实现此功能的免费开源工具。

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. 如果 Meetily 不适合你，还有其他一些类似的工具。例如，noScribe 是一个完全免费且能识别发言人的工具，但它无法实时录制会议（只能转换文件）。Anarlog（前身为 Hyprnote）的用户界面可以说更简洁，且支持多种 AI 模型，但与 Meetily 相比，设置过程稍微繁琐一些。Quill 提供免费的本地转录，但你需要注册账户才能使用（这违背了离线工具的初衷），而且其中包含大量的推销内容。

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. 很高兴有这么多免费的选择，如果这个领域的发展轨迹和听写软件类似，我相信几个月后会有更多更好的工具出现。