AI Assist

AI Assist is a meeting companion that transcribes Google Meet and Zoom calls locally on your machine instead of sending audio to a third party. It runs through a Chrome extension paired with a desktop helper app, and you bring your own OpenAI and Anthropic API keys. No bot ever joins your call. The audio stays on your device, gets transcribed via Whisper, and the language model runs against your own API account. That's the core promise, and it changes the economics and privacy posture of meeting notes pretty significantly.

The setup involves installing both the browser extension and a small desktop app. The extension captures the meeting tab, the desktop helper handles transcription and AI processing, and the two communicate over localhost. Your audio never touches AI Assist's servers. Instead it streams directly to OpenAI's Whisper endpoint through your key. The result is live captions during the call and a transcript you can query afterward.

Beyond transcription, the tool indexes local documents you've permissioned and surfaces relevant excerpts while the meeting unfolds. If someone mentions a project and you've got related files on your machine, AI Assist can pull up citations proactively. You can also ask questions during or after the call and get answers grounded in your own files, not just the transcript.

Who it's for is anyone who needs meeting notes without handing their audio to another company. Freelancers, consultants, lawyers, healthcare workers, or anyone in a compliance-sensitive role will recognize the appeal. If you've avoided Otter or Fireflies because you didn't want a bot joining or your audio sitting on someone else's server, this fills that gap.

Pricing is unusual for the category. The desktop license is three dollars, one time, with a 14 day trial. You pay OpenAI and Anthropic directly for usage, roughly 36 cents per hour of audio for transcription and around 50 cents to two dollars per meeting for the language model. Optional cloud sync costs three dollars a month and encrypts transcripts on your device before they leave. There's no per seat fee, no monthly subscription for the core product, and no markup on API calls.

Current platform support covers macOS and Linux, with Windows and ChromeOS in development. Google Meet and Zoom Web work now, Microsoft Teams Web is coming. The extension and desktop app are separate installs, which adds a step but keeps the architecture clean, the browser extension never sees raw audio, only the local helper does.

If you've wanted a private meeting assistant that doesn't phone home with your recordings, AI Assist is one of the few products built around that constraint. The tradeoff is a bit more setup, bringing your own keys, and per meeting API costs instead of a flat subscription. For users who value local processing and transparent pricing, that's a trade worth making.