Using Parley with Claude (MCP)

parley-mcp is a small Model Context Protocol server that lets AI assistants such as Claude Desktop and Claude Code read your Parley meetings. You can then ask things like “what did we decide about the Q3 budget?” or “which action items do I still have open?”.

It reads Parley’s database directly on your computer, works whether or not Parley is running (even during a recording), and sends your data nowhere except to the assistant that started it. Bear in mind that whatever the assistant reads is then sent to its own model provider.

Getting parley-mcp

parley-mcp comes with Parley (version 0.5.1 and later):

• If you used the install command, it’s already installed at ~/.local/bin/parley-mcp.
• If you downloaded the AppImage yourself, open Settings → Integrations and click Install parley-mcp, which copies it to ~/.local/bin/parley-mcp. After updating Parley, the same button reads Update parley-mcp.

Assistants can’t use the copy inside the AppImage directly, because its location changes every time Parley starts.

Settings → Integrations also gives you ready-made setup commands with the right paths filled in, each with a copy button.

Connecting an assistant

Assistants start parley-mcp themselves, so give them its full path (they don’t understand ~).

Claude Code:

claude mcp add parley -- /home/you/.local/bin/parley-mcp

Claude Desktop: add this to ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json and restart Claude Desktop:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "parley": {
      "command": "/home/you/.local/bin/parley-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Run Parley at least once before connecting, so that its database exists.

What the assistant can do

It can read:

• your meetings, with their summaries, transcripts, chapters, bookmarks, notes and talk-time statistics,
• the calendar event each meeting belongs to, with its attendees, and your upcoming events,
• the people Parley recognises, so it can find every meeting with someone,
• the briefs and follow-up email drafts you’ve made in Parley,
• your action items.

It can search transcripts by keyword, or by meaning, using the same on-device semantic search as Ask Parley. Searching by meaning covers the meetings Parley has indexed, which it does while Ask Parley is open, and needs Parley to have been started once from its AppImage so parley-mcp can borrow its built-in model runner.

It can also add notes, add, edit, complete and delete action items, and replace a meeting’s summary. Anything it creates is marked as coming from the agent.

Try asking it to “prepare me for my next meeting”, “what has Priya committed to this month?” or “draft a recap of every Sprint Planning this quarter”.

The full list of tools is in the parley-mcp README.