At a tech meetup in Austin last month, someone showed me how they use AI to draft meeting notes in real time

I always thought AI meeting tools were just gimmicks for big corporations. But this guy at a local coworking space in Austin had a simple setup that turned his laptop mic into a live note taker. He used a free open source tool called Whisper to transcribe, then ran it through a local model to summarize action items. The whole thing ran on a $60 Raspberry Pi he built himself. I spent two hours trying it after that meetup and it saved me at least 3 hours of manual note taking that week. Has anyone else found a lightweight DIY AI setup that actually works for everyday stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

sama801mo ago

Laughed so hard I almost choked on my coffee, then realized I was the one who tripped over the power cord to my own laptop.

the_lisa29d ago

gonna be real with you, i tried that exact whisper setup last year and it was a mess in practice. the transcription was super slow and kept mixing up words when people talked over each other, which happens all the time in actual meetings. plus the local model summarization gave me garbage headlines like "discussed stuff about project" instead of actual action items. i spent more time fixing the output than i would have just typing notes myself.