I have a problem with long videos. Not with watching them - with intending to watch them. A two-hour podcast episode gets bookmarked, a conference talk gets opened in a tab, a lecture gets saved for the weekend, and then the weekend arrives with three more of them. The backlog only grows.

So I built Just The Gist, a free Mac app that takes the things I was never going to finish watching and turns them into something I’ll actually read: a clean transcript and a sharp summary, with the key moments called out. A two-hour podcast becomes a four-minute read. If a section earns my attention, every timestamp links back to the exact second in the source, so I can jump in and hear it properly.

Local by default

The part I’m most pleased with: the whole pipeline runs on your Mac.

Transcription happens on-device with Whisper - in around 100 languages, and fast on Apple Silicon. And since the last release, summarization is local too: on first launch the app downloads a small local model, and that’s it. No account, no API key, no credit card, nothing to sign up for. You drop in a YouTube link or a file, and nothing leaves your machine.

If you want a bigger model for the summaries, that’s still there - connect OpenRouter’s free tier in one click, paste your own Claude or OpenAI key, or point the app at anything speaking the OpenAI API, which means a model running in Ollama or LM Studio on your own hardware works out of the box. But it’s a choice you opt into, not a requirement. Even then, only the finished text transcript goes out - the audio never does.

What it handles

YouTube links, plus any local audio or video file - mp3, m4a, wav, mp4, mov. Podcasts, lectures, meeting recordings, conference talks. If it has speech, it can be gisted.

The app itself is native SwiftUI, signed and notarized, and updates itself quietly. It needs an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer) running macOS 14 or later.

Free, kept alive by coffee

No subscription, no locked features. I built it because I wanted it to exist; it’s free because that’s how I’d want to receive it. If it saves you an afternoon and you feel like buying me a coffee, that’s what keeps it maintained and moving.

Grab it at justthegist.app - and if you try it, I’d genuinely love to hear what you fed it first.