Transcribe a Basque council meeting and start the minutes from text, not memory.
A 3.5-hour Basque-language council plenary is transcribed in about 7 minutes, since processing runs at roughly 2 minutes per hour of audio and Basque is recognised without any setting. Packs start at $4 for 300 minutes, and credits never expire.
For council secretaries
The plenary takes an evening. Writing it up should not take the rest of the week.
Every agenda item has a chapter
The text is split at each point of the order of business: approval of the previous minutes, the budget change, the motions, questions from the floor. The secretary drafts item by item with the timestamp beside each one.
Votes and figures pulled out
The brief collects the motions put, the vote counts read aloud, the amounts in the budget debate and any dates fixed for the next steps, each with the moment it was said.
When the chamber video is too big
A council video at 3 Mbps uses about 1.35 GB per hour (375 KB a second times 3,600 seconds), so a 4-hour session is around 5.4 GB and over the 5 GB file limit. Export the audio track, near 230 MB at 128 kbps, and send it through the upload page, or paste the session's YouTube link.
Read once, then file
Basque output is a fast first draft, plan one review pass: read it against the audio for place names, surnames and the exact wording of each motion. The transcript is a working text for drafting the minutes, not an official or certified record.
Why the minutes run late
Four hours of debate in two languages, and one person to write them up.
✗ Minutes from handwritten notes
The secretary keeps notes during the session, then replays the recording for any intervention that matters, one passage at a time.
- Hours of replay for one councillor's point
- Spanish and Basque interventions in the same item
- Chamber video too large to share
- Vote counts checked against the video
- No chapter index for the public archive
- General tools that do not recognise Basque
✓ Minutes from the transcript
The session comes back as Basque text with each agenda item as a chapter, so drafting starts the same night.
- About 7 minutes for a 3.5-hour plenary
- Chapters per agenda item
- Councillors named in the summary and key quotes
- Motions and votes with timestamps
- Chat to find where a topic came up
- A year of monthly plenaries on the $32 pack
Sample output
A municipal plenary, from the opening to the close.
An illustrative Basque excerpt written for this page; no real council or councillor is quoted. In English: good afternoon, we open the plenary; approval of the last minutes is proposed, any comments; the group will vote against the budget change; vote: ten for, two against, one abstention; thank you, the session is closed.
Export
One transcript. Five clean formats.
Every pack exports all five — no format is held back for a higher tier.
Plain text
De-ummed paragraphs. Ready to paste.
SRT captions
Timed to the speech. Every video editor reads this.
WebVTT
HTML5 player + YouTube uploads.
Show notes
Formatted with chapters and pull-quotes.
Machine-readable
Timestamped text for your own tools.
Pricing
Honest pricing, no surprises.
A pack from $4 (300 minutes) opens the full transcript. After that, no subscription and no auto-renew — every tier is a one-time minute pack, and credits never expire. Buy once, use the minutes whenever you need them.
Casual pack
$4/300 min
5 hours of audio — $0.80 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 300 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- AI chat over the whole transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$18/3,000 min
50 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 3,000 minutes of audio
- Summary, chapters and key quotes
- All export formats
- AI chat over the whole transcript
Bulk pack
$32/6,000 min
100 hours of audio — $0.32 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 6,000 minutes of audio
- Summary, chapters and key quotes
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
Basque council recordings, answered.
How long until a 3.5-hour plenary is text?
About 7 minutes. A 2-hour committee meeting is ready in roughly 4, so the secretary can upload before leaving the chamber and open the transcript at home.
How many sessions does each pack cover?
Packs start at $4 for 300 minutes, and credits never expire. Six ordinary plenaries of 3 hours, 1,080 minutes, fit the $18 pack of 3,000.
Some councillors speak Spanish. Does that break the transcript?
Basque is detected automatically as the main language, and English terms dropped into the debate are handled in the same pass. A recording that switches language is detected on its main language, so an intervention given entirely in Spanish is the part to check most closely during the review.
Will the session upload as one file?
Yes, as long as it stays within 10 hours or 5 GB. Uploads go up to 5 GB per file; a larger file can be split or exported as audio. Sessions already on YouTube can be pasted as a link, and a Google Drive folder of past plenaries works too.
Can members of the public see who spoke on each item?
The councillors who are introduced or addressed by name are identified in the summary, key quotes and chapters, which is enough to attribute each position when drafting. Lines in the transcript itself are not tagged with a speaker, so the minutes still pass through the secretary's hands.
Is a recording of a closed session safe to send?
Sessions are transcribed on our own servers and never used for training. Exports are TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON, so the secretary can keep the DOCX for the minutes and the SRT for captions on the public video.
Related
More for council recordings
Upload last night's plenary. Draft the minutes from text this morning.
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