AI Tools7 min read

Quill Meetings Review (2026): Free Local Transcription, No Meeting Bot

Quill transcribes meetings on your Mac with no bot in the call and no cloud upload, and the free tier is unlimited. Three months of real meetings, the setup, what Pro adds, and ChatGPT prompts you can use with exported transcripts.

Most AI meeting tools make you pick your poison: hand your audio to a cloud server, let a bot join your call where everyone can see it, or pay a subscription that's hard to justify for solo use. Quill doesn't make you choose. It transcribes locally on your device, stays invisible to other participants, and the free tier is genuinely unlimited, not a trial.

In my May 2025 recording, I described using it for three months without writing meeting notes by hand and capturing roughly 40 percent more action items. That is my original estimate, not a fresh measurement of the current app.

What I measured, and what's current#

• The walkthrough below reflects my May 2025 recording. I checked the linked vendor pricing page on September 5, 2026, but have not repeated the three-month test.
• Still free for transcription. Quill's pricing page still describes local transcription as free forever with no per-minute fees or credit limits and unlimited recording length. The current page lists paid plans for AI outputs and additional workflows. Check the billing option and limits there before subscribing. Local transcription does not mean every AI feature stays on your device: the page also lists cloud and air-gapped enterprise options.
• My recording uses the Mac app. The current pricing page also lists an iOS companion app. I have not tested that workflow for this update.
• The wearable I paired it with is gone. The Limitless pendant I recommended for in-person capture stopped selling after Meta acquired Limitless in December 2025, which makes a desk tool like Quill the practical core of a private note-taking setup now. Details in the updated Limitless review.

Why Local Processing Is the Real Differentiator#

Tools like Otter.ai and Fireflies transcribe on their servers. Your audio and transcript data leave your machine, get stored somewhere you don't control, and become subject to their retention and security policies. For most personal use that's fine. For anything involving clients, legal conversations, or internal strategy, it's a real problem.

Quill advertises local transcription. Check the data handling for the specific AI features and integrations you enable; the transcription promise is not a guarantee that every feature runs locally. Exporting a transcript to an online AI service, including the workflow below, sends it to that service.

It also means no bot joins the call. When I'm in Google Meet with a client, they don't see a "Quill Notetaker" participant request to be admitted. You don't see another notetaker in the call; Quill acts on top of your Google Meet. The recording happens at the system level on your machine, silently, while the meeting runs normally. You still need to tell the other person you're recording, which is both legally required in many places and just the right thing to do, but the experience is far less intrusive than a bot-based tool.

For comparison, if you've tested Fellow AI or Notta AI, you'll notice immediately that both rely on cloud processing and bot-based joining. They're excellent tools, but they make different trade-offs.

Setting Up Quill#

Unlike most meeting tools, Quill isn't a web app. You install the desktop client, and that's where everything runs.

Once installed, connect it to your calendar. Under settings, you can link Google Calendar, Zoom, or Teams. When you join a meeting that matches a calendar event, Quill prompts you to start recording automatically. You don't have to remember to hit a button.

For one-off calls without a calendar event, you can start a recording manually from the home screen with a single click or keyboard shortcut. You can also import audio files or YouTube URLs directly, which is useful for processing recorded calls or pulling transcripts from external videos.

This recorded setup captures conversations on my computer. For conversations away from the desk, the current pricing page lists an iOS companion; that is outside the test shown here. A phone voice memo is another workflow to try with the prompts below.

The Free Tier Is Genuinely Capable#

Here's what you get without paying anything: unlimited meeting transcription, full transcript export, speaker identification with timestamps, and the ability to ask follow-up questions about the transcript inside the app.

What the Pro plan adds is one-click AI outputs: meeting summaries, follow-up emails, to-do lists sorted by priority, generated without leaving Quill. It also gives you integrations with project management tools like Linear, Trello, ClickUp, and HubSpot.

The honest assessment: Pro is worth it if you're running back-to-back meetings and want to cut the extra steps. But the free tier gets you to the same output with one additional move: export the transcript and paste it into ChatGPT.

Replicating Pro Features for Free with ChatGPT#

After a meeting ends, copy your transcript from Quill (there's a share and copy button in the transcript view) and paste it into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or whatever model you prefer. You don't need a paid plan on any of them.

With the right prompts, you get:

• A structured meeting summary with key decisions and sub-bullets
• A follow-up email drafted in your voice, ready to copy into Gmail or Outlook
• A prioritized to-do list sorted by urgency, with ownership assigned per action item

The outputs from a good prompt are functionally identical to what Quill Pro generates natively. The difference is two extra minutes and a copy-paste.

If you want the exact prompt templates, the meeting summarizer, follow-up email, and to-do list prioritizer, rather than building them yourself, the Have More Productive Meetings with AI guide has them ready to use. Those are the prompts I use in the video.

Personalizing Quill for Your Workflow#

Under Settings, then Personalizations, you can create custom meeting templates for different meeting types: internal syncs, product management tickets, client calls, portfolio reviews. Each template shapes how Quill structures its AI outputs when you hit one-click generation on Pro, or gives you a clear framework for your ChatGPT prompts on free.

The template library includes pre-built options like "Brief My Team" (formats a team update email from the transcript) and "Write My To-Do List" (categorizes action items into urgent, next, and bonus). These aren't gimmicks. The urgent, next, bonus prioritization in particular is where AI genuinely earns its place in a meeting workflow.

When to Upgrade to Pro#

The free tier handles everything described above. Pro makes sense when the friction of copy-pasting to ChatGPT starts costing you more time than the subscription costs. If you're in five or more meetings a week, that calculation tips quickly.

The integrations are the other reason to consider Pro. Connecting Quill directly to Linear or ClickUp so action items flow into your project management system without a manual step is a meaningful workflow improvement, not just a convenience feature.

For now, if you're starting out or running occasional meetings, stay on free. Set up the calendar integration, use the transcript export, and build your ChatGPT prompt workflow. You'll stop writing meeting notes immediately, and you'll start actually doing something with the action items that come out of every call. If you want the email and calendar side automated too, Fyxer AI drafts the replies and sends its own notetaker, at a price, and the two coexist fine: Quill for the private calls, Fyxer for the ones where a shared summary is the point.

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Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xlerH2GuY7s

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