Notely AI

Standalone AI desktop client. An Electron app that performs meeting transcription and AI-powered summarization locally on the user's machine, without sending audio or transcripts to a cloud service. Fully standalone — no backend, no license server, no activation.

What it does

• Records meetings from microphone + system audio
• Transcribes speech to text using a local Whisper model (CPU or GPU)
• Generates meeting summaries using a local LLM via llama.cpp
• Stores everything in a local encrypted SQLite database
• Runs entirely on your machine with no cloud dependency

Every feature is unlocked by default. There is no license, no activation step, no upgrade prompt.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+
• Python 3.11+ (for the local transcription pipeline)
• A C++ toolchain (for the native addons under native/)
• OpenSSL development headers
• Platform-specific build tools:
  • Ubuntu/Debian: build-essential g++ make python3-dev libsecret-1-dev libssl-dev
  • macOS: Xcode command-line tools (OpenSSL via Homebrew)
  • Windows: Visual Studio Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload; OpenSSL for Windows

Development setup

1. Install Node.js dependencies:

   npm install

2. Build the native addon, main bundle, renderer, and preload:

   npm run build

3. Set up the Python transcription environment:

   bash scripts/setup-python-env.sh

4. Download a Whisper model into src/main/transcription/models/ (e.g., tiny.en.pt for quick CPU testing, or a larger model for better accuracy).

5. Start the dev app:

   npm run dev

Development-only environment variables

• DEBUG_DB=true — disables SQLCipher database encryption. Development only. The app logs a prominent warning at startup when it is active.
• NOTELY_MODEL_DIR — override the default Whisper model directory
• NOTELY_MODEL_NAME — choose which .pt model file to load
• NOTELY_USE_GPU — enable CUDA acceleration if a compatible GPU is present

Building a release

The public repo ships a minimal CI workflow (.github/workflows/ci.yml) that runs lint and type-check only. It does not build signed release artifacts.

If you want to produce signed builds of your own, fork the repo and add a workflow that configures the relevant signing credentials as GitHub Actions secrets (CSC_LINK, CSC_KEY_PASSWORD, APPLE_ID, APPLE_APP_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD, APPLE_TEAM_ID, etc.) and calls electron-builder.

Related repositories

• notely-cloud — cloud desktop client that syncs notes with a self-hosted backend
• notely-platform — microservices backend powering notely-cloud

Security

To report a vulnerability, see SECURITY.md.

License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.