Meetily: An Open-Source and Privacy-First AI Meeting Assistant & Note Taker

Choosing an AI meeting assistant for live transcription and summarization often involves a trade-off between features and privacy. While proprietary tools like Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai lead in functionality, the open-source alternative Meetily : A Privacy first Ai for taking meeting notes for taking meeting notes is carving out a critical niche with a different value proposition.

Here’s a breakdown based on its current state and future direction.

Current Features & How It Compares

Meetily’s strength is its "local-first" architecture. Its core functions include:

Live Transcription & Summaries: It captures and summarizes your meetings in real-time, similar to other tools.
Platform Agnostic: Works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams by capturing system audio.
100% Data Sovereignty: This is the key differentiator. All processing happens on your device. Your data never touches a third-party cloud, making it a viable option for those in legal, finance, or healthcare.

Compared to proprietary solutions, there are clear trade-offs:

Otter.ai & Fireflies.ai: Offer mature, cloud-based ecosystems with robust speaker diarization (identifying who said what), extensive custom vocabularies, and deep CRM integrations. They prioritize a seamless user experience and rich feature sets.
Meetily: Prioritizes privacy and control over a polished feature set. It currently lacks the advanced speaker identification and seamless integrations of its paid counterparts.

The Roadmap: What’s Coming Next?

The development team is actively working to close the biggest feature gaps. The public roadmap shows a clear focus on:

Speaker Diarization: The most requested feature, the automatic identification and labelling of different speakers, is a top priority.
Linux Support: Expanding beyond Windows and macOS to serve a broader technical audience.
Deeper Integrations: Plans for an Obsidian integration and project-based memory show a focus on the "power user" and personal knowledge management (PKM) communities.

Conclusion & Recommendation

Meetily is a powerful tool, but it's not for everyone - yet.

Adopt Now If: You are a developer, a privacy-conscious power user, or part of an organization where data sovereignty is a strict, non-negotiable requirement. If you have the technical resources to manage a self-hosted solution and can live without polished speaker diarization for now, Meetily offers unmatched privacy.
Wait and Watch If: Your primary need is a frictionless, feature-complete tool that works flawlessly out of the box. If robust speaker identification and deep workflow integrations are critical for your team, it’s best to monitor Meetily’s progress until key roadmap features are released.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how Meetily bridges the gap between privacy and usability and the new features to come.