Just The Gist AI
AI Summarizer Tools
Turn hours long videos and podcasts in 4 minutes reads.
What does Just The Gist AI do?
Somewhere in that 2-hour podcast is the ten minutes you actually care about. Just The Gist finds it for you. Paste a YouTube link — or drop in any local audio or video file (mp3, m4a, wav, mp4, mov) — and the app hands back a clean, timestamped transcript and a sharp, structured summary: a TL;DR up top, the key topics broken out below, ready to skim, search, or share. Podcasts, lectures, conference talks, meeting recordings, interviews — if it has speech, it can be gisted.
What makes it different from the pile of cloud summarizers is that it's **100% local by default**. Transcription runs on-device with Whisper, and on first launch the app downloads a compact local language model that does the summarizing right on your Mac too. No account, no API key, no credit card, no usage caps — and your audio never leaves your machine. For most tools in this category, "private" is a settings toggle. Here it's the starting point.
When you want a bigger brain, the cloud is one click away — and it's your choice, on your terms. Connect OpenRouter's free tier in a single browser round-trip, paste a Claude or OpenAI key, or point the app at any OpenAI-compatible server, so a larger model running through Ollama or LM Studio works out of the box. Even then, only the finished text transcript is sent, and only for summarizing. And if you'd rather not wire up anything at all, Magic Copy puts the full transcript and a ready-made prompt on your clipboard, primed to paste straight into claude.ai or ChatGPT.
It feels like a Mac app because it is one: a native three-pane window with your library, media list, and summary side by side, live progress as Whisper works through the audio, and summaries that stream in as they're generated. It's notarized by Apple, updates itself automatically, and runs on any Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer) with macOS 14 Sonoma or later.
And it's genuinely free — free download, no subscription, no locked features, nothing to sign up for. Development is supported by donations from people who use it. Stop scrubbing through videos at 2x hoping to land on the good part. Get the gist instead.