AI Tools6 min read

Quill Meetings Review: Private AI Notes, No Bots, No Cloud

Quill transcribes meetings locally on your device, no cloud storage, no bot joining your call, no subscription required. Here's how to set it up and get the most out of it.

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.

I've been using it for three months. I haven't written a single meeting note in that time, and I'm capturing roughly 40% more action items than I was before.

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 processes everything on-device. Your audio never leaves your computer. The transcript never hits a cloud server. If you've ever had a security or compliance conversation with a CSO, that distinction matters enormously, and no major competitor can currently claim it.

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. As Moe puts it: "You don't see another notetaker in the call, Quill is acting 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, that's 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 download the desktop client directly from their site, install it like any other Mac or Windows app, 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.

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/copy button in the transcript view) and paste it into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or whatever LLM 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. That's the resource Moe references throughout his walkthrough. For custom ChatGPT prompts for meetings that go beyond the basics, it's the fastest starting point.

Personalizing Quill for Your Workflow#

Under Settings > 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.

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

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