How to Transcribe a Meeting

Check whether your meeting tool already produced a transcript before you transcribe the recording again. Zoom, Teams and Google Meet all offer them, often on paid plans. If one exists, you have saved yourself a step.

Tell people they are being recorded

Before anything else. Most meeting platforms announce it automatically, which is the minimum rather than the whole obligation. Say it out loud, and say what the recording is for.

Recording consent rules vary by jurisdiction, and on a call with participants in several countries more than one set may apply. Beyond the law, people speak differently when they know they are on the record, and they are entitled to know.

If your meeting tool has transcription

Use it. It is already there, it needs no upload, and for a routine internal meeting it is enough. Its weaknesses are the usual ones: names, technical terms and anybody who talks over somebody else.

Reasons to transcribe the recording separately anyway: you need better accuracy, you need a format the meeting tool does not export, or you want the record somewhere other than that vendor's cloud.

If it does not

1. Download the recording.
2. Upload it to transcribe audio.
3. Rename the speaker labels to real names.
4. Read through with the audio playing, correcting names, numbers and decisions.
5. Export Markdown for a formatted record.

Getting a usable recording

Remote meetings transcribe better than in-person ones, because each person is already on their own microphone. In-person meetings are the hard case:

• One laptop microphone at the end of a long table records mostly table.
• Meeting rooms are acoustically the worst kind of room — hard surfaces on every side.
• Several people, often talking at once.

If in-person meetings are routine, a decent conference microphone in the middle of the table will do more for your transcripts than any software choice. For hybrid meetings, having in-room participants join on their own devices, muted except when speaking, works remarkably well.

What to do with the transcript

A full meeting transcript is rarely the useful artefact. What people want is shorter:

• Decisions. What was agreed, by whom.
• Actions. Who is doing what, by when.
• Open questions. What was raised and not settled.
• The record. The full transcript, kept but not circulated.

Write the summary from the transcript and circulate that. Attach or link the full transcript for anyone who needs to check what was actually said.

Retention

Decide how long you keep meeting recordings and transcripts, and apply it consistently. Indefinitely is a decision too, and usually not a good one: a written record of every internal conversation is a liability as well as an asset. If your organisation has a retention policy, meeting transcripts fall under it.

A note on sensitive meetings

For conversations covered by legal privilege, medical confidentiality or similar, think about where the audio goes before you upload it anywhere. Any cloud transcription service means the recording is processed on someone else's infrastructure. Running transcription on hardware you control is the only approach that removes the question entirely, and the software behind this service can be self-hosted for that reason.