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How to Transcribe a Meeting

Nobody wants a wall of transcribed dialogue after a meeting. What you want is decisions, owners and dates. This guide covers turning a raw recording into something you would actually circulate — and being honest about which parts still need a human.

What to extract from a meeting transcript

A recording contains a great deal of material that nobody wants in writing. The value of a transcript is not completeness, it is extraction. Three things are worth pulling out: the decisions that were made, the actions that were assigned, and the open questions that nobody closed.

Language is the fastest filter. Decisions cluster around "we decided", "let us go with", "we will use". Actions cluster around a name followed by a verb — "Sarah will send", "I will draft". Everything else is context you can read once and discard.

Worth writing down explicitly: anything that was discussed and left unresolved. Meetings that end without a decision often look productive while producing nothing, and a transcript makes that visible in a way that memory does not.

Multi-speaker calls and bad audio

Conference calls are the hardest audio there is. Every participant is on a different codec, levels vary wildly, and one person is usually on a phone line. Expect more errors than a single-mic recording, and give yourself time for a correction pass.

If you control the setup, ask for headphones rather than speakers. Headphones remove the feedback path that makes distant participants hard to hear, which is usually the single biggest quality win available.

If the call is already recorded and rough, transcribe it anyway. The transcript will be usable for decisions even when individual words are wrong, and correcting a rough transcript is far faster than reconstructing decisions from memory a week later.

Turning the transcript into notes people read

Do not circulate raw dialogue. Nobody reads a wall of transcribed speech, so a transcript that is merely dumped into a document produces the appearance of documentation and none of the benefit.

Restructure it. Group by agenda item, pull decisions and actions to the top, and keep the transcript underneath as the record of what was actually said. The structure is what makes it read; the transcript is what makes it checkable.

Keep timestamps in whatever you send. When someone disputes a decision two days later, the timestamp turns an argument into a thirty-second listen.

Meetings longer than ten minutes

The limit is 10 minutes and 100 MB per file, so any realistic meeting needs splitting. Split on agenda items rather than on elapsed time: each part then covers one topic, and reassembly is obvious.

Keep the agenda to hand while you split. It is the only reliable way to find the natural break points, and it means each part has a title you can use in the notes.

Overlap the joins by about a second. A model occasionally drops the opening words of a file, and a one-second overlap costs nothing but prevents a lost sentence at each boundary.

Step by step

1

Split anything past ten minutes

Meetings routinely run 30 to 60 minutes. Split on agenda items so each part is a coherent topic, transcribe the parts, and read them back in order. Keeping the split aligned to the agenda makes the reassembly trivial.

2

Upload one part and choose paragraph mode

Paragraph mode groups related discussion into blocks that read like notes rather than dialogue. It is the most useful mode for meetings because you are after themes, not individual lines.

3

Transcribe and read for decisions

Look for sentences where a decision was actually made. "I think we should" is a discussion; "we decided to" is a decision. The transcript is much better at separating the two than memory is.

4

Extract action items with their owners

For every commitment, capture who made it, what they will do, and by when. This is the step people skip, and it is the reason a transcript is often more useful than a recording nobody reopens.

5

Export TXT for notes, SRT if the meeting was recorded for video

Most meetings want plain text. Export before the 60-minute retention window expires — the follow-up task list is the whole point.

Open the transcription tool

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Konthora identify who said what in a meeting?
No. There is no speaker labelling, so lines come back unattributed. For follow-up you will be reading for commitments and attributing them yourself; word-level timestamps make that easier by letting you jump to a moment in the recording.
How do I get action items out of a long meeting recording?
Split the recording on agenda items, transcribe each part in paragraph mode, then scan for decision language such as "we decided" and for a name followed by a verb. Those two patterns find most commitments far faster than reading the whole transcript.
What is the maximum meeting length Konthora can handle?
10 minutes and 100 MB per file, so a 60-minute meeting needs roughly six parts. Split on agenda items, overlap the joins by a second so no sentence is lost, and export each part before the 60-minute retention window closes.
Is a transcript a reliable record of what was agreed?
It is a good first pass and far better than memory, but it is not a legal record. Read it against the audio before circulating anything externally, and keep the original recording for anything that may be contested.