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How to write meeting minutes from a recording
Minutes written from memory two days later are a summary of what one person remembers. Minutes written from the recording are a record of what was actually said, and the difference shows up the first time someone disagrees about a commitment.
This guide is about the practical route from an audio file to a document with decisions and owners in it.
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Step by step
- Export the recordingMost conferencing tools let you save the meeting audio after the call. Any MP3, WAV, M4A or OGG file works, and a phone left on the table works for a meeting in a room.
- Transcribe the fileThe text comes back punctuated and split into paragraphs rather than as a single block, which is what makes it searchable in practice.
- Search for the decisionsMinutes are not a transcript. Search for the phrases that mark commitments, such as we agreed, I will take, by Friday, and pull those passages out.
- Write the minutes on topOne line per decision, one line per action with a name and a date, and a short list of what was deliberately left open. Everything else stays in the transcript.
Four people, one continuous transcript
The transcript does not label speakers. For a one-on-one that is a minor annoyance; for a meeting with four people it is the main limitation, because minutes are built on attribution — who committed to what.
The practical fix is in the meeting itself, not afterwards: ask people to say their name before speaking in the part where actions are assigned, or have whoever runs the meeting restate each commitment out loud with the name attached. That single habit makes the transcript usable and, incidentally, makes the meeting better.
What transcribes badly in a meeting
Crosstalk is the worst case: two people talking at once come back as a mangled sentence, and that is exactly the moment when a decision was being argued over. Speakerphones in large rooms and participants far from the microphone come a close second.
A remote meeting recorded through the conferencing tool usually transcribes better than the same meeting recorded in a room, because each voice arrives at a similar level.
Summaries and what to keep
With an account, the content tools can compress the transcript into a summary, which is a reasonable first draft of the minutes as long as you check the action items against the text yourself.
Decide up front how long you keep the recordings. A searchable archive of everything said in every meeting is useful right up until someone asks for it in a dispute, and that is a policy question rather than a technical one.
Frequent questions
Does it identify who said what?
No. The transcript is continuous text with no speaker labels, so attribution is something you add while writing the minutes.
Can it join the meeting and transcribe it live?
No. It does not enter a call on its own. You record the meeting with the tool you already use and upload the file afterwards. Live transcription exists, but for streams, and is part of the Pro plan.
How accurate is it for a meeting?
Clear audio transcribes very well. Accuracy drops with crosstalk, background noise and voices far from the microphone.
How long does a one-hour meeting take?
Usually a few minutes, and the site shows an estimate before it starts, based on the real length of the file.
Can I export the minutes as subtitles?
The transcript downloads as a .txt file. There is no .srt or .vtt export, so subtitles are not part of what this does.