Transcribe council meeting recordings in Australia, agenda item by agenda item.
An Australian council meeting of 3 to 6 hours comes back as text in about 6 to 12 minutes, and the first 20 minutes are free. A 4-hour meeting is 240 minutes on the $6 pack of 500 minutes, and the brief gives you the motions, figures and speakers to start the minutes from.
For governance staff, journalists and residents
A long council meeting, turned into something you can find a decision in.
From the posted video
Many councils livestream their meetings and post the recording afterwards. If it is on YouTube or Vimeo, paste the link and nothing needs downloading. A recording held by the council itself can be uploaded as a file of up to 10 hours or 5 GB.
Minutes start from the brief
The brief lists the takeaways, and the names, numbers and dates said in the chamber are pulled out: motion movers, amounts and deadlines. Staff still write and confirm the official minutes; the transcript gives them the exact words to work from.
Agenda items as chapters
Chapters with timestamps follow the meeting as it moved through the agenda, from public question time to the last item of general business. Residents can go straight to the item about their street instead of watching four hours.
A year of meetings
A 4-hour meeting once a month is 48 hours a year, or 2,880 minutes. That fits the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes with room for committee meetings, at about $0.29 an audio hour. A single meeting fits the $6 pack.
Why council recordings are hard to use
Every decision is on the record, and none of it is searchable.
✗ Watching the whole meeting
Finding one debate in a posted meeting video usually means scrubbing through hours of procedural business. Residents give up, and staff answering a query about an old decision spend an afternoon on it.
- Hours of video with no index
- Minutes that summarise but do not quote
- Votes and movers noted by hand
- Public questions hard to locate
- Captions that cannot be searched
- Upload caps that cut the meeting short
✓ The meeting as text
One link returns the whole meeting with chapters and a brief. Each agenda item has a start time, so a debate can be found, read and quoted in minutes.
- A 4-hour meeting back in about 8 minutes
- Chapters by agenda item
- Mayor and councillors named in the summary
- Motions, amounts and dates pulled out
- Chat to find what was said on an item
- DOCX for the minute-taker
Sample
A council meeting, as it comes back.
This sample is illustrative and was written for this page; it does not come from any council's meeting. Mayor, resident and councillor stand in for the names a summary would show.
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 $6 (500 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
$6/500 min
8 hours of audio — $0.72 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 500 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$12/2,000 min
33 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 2,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
Bulk pack
$24/5,000 min
83 hours of audio — $0.29 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 5,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
Council meeting recordings, the common questions.
How long does a council meeting take to transcribe?
Roughly 2 minutes per audio hour, so a 3-hour meeting takes about 6 and a 6-hour budget meeting about 12. A pasted link adds a short fetch at the start.
What does one meeting cost, and a year of them?
A 4-hour meeting is 240 minutes on the $6 pack of 500. Twelve monthly meetings come to 2,880 minutes, which fits the $24 pack of 5,000. Prices are in US dollars, and your card converts them at checkout.
Can the transcript replace the official minutes?
No. The minutes are the council's official record and are written and confirmed by its own process. The transcript and brief are a working draft source with timestamps, useful for checking who moved what and when.
The meeting video is long and large. Will it work?
Pasting the YouTube or Vimeo link avoids an upload. A file goes up to 2 GB before the first pack and up to 5 GB or 10 hours after it. A meeting that ran past 10 hours goes in as two files.
Do accents and other languages come through?
99 languages are detected automatically, and speakers with any English accent are transcribed as spoken. A speaker who addresses council in another language is transcribed in that language.
Who sees the recording, and what can I download?
Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training. You can take TXT, DOCX or JSON, and SRT or VTT captions for the posted video.
Related
More civic meetings
Paste the meeting link. Find the decision by agenda item.
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