Transcribe council meetings from a Canadian city or town hall.
Council meeting recordings in Canada often run three to six hours, and the minutes need to say what was moved and decided. A 5-hour meeting comes back in about 10 minutes as one transcript, with the motions, amounts and dates pulled into a brief, and the first 20 minutes are free.
From the chamber to the minutes
The whole agenda, in order, with the decisions easy to find.
Agenda items become chapters
Delegations, staff reports, the consent agenda and each motion tend to fall into separate chapters with their start times. The clerk can jump to item 7.3 instead of scrubbing through the third hour looking for the vote.
Numbers that matter, listed
Budget lines, by-law numbers, addresses in a zoning application and the dates of the next public meeting are gathered in one list of the names, numbers and dates that were said. Each one links back to its moment in the recording so it can be checked.
Paste the public link
Many councils post the meeting on YouTube or share it from Google Drive. Paste that link and there is nothing to download or upload; the audio is fetched and transcribed directly. upload page
A rough draft of the minutes
The brief opens with what the meeting decided and the main points raised, which is a fast first draft for minutes. The official minutes stay the clerk’s work; this gives them the words and the times to work from.
Why council audio is slow to turn into minutes
A late-night meeting is long, crowded and full of numbers.
✗ Replaying the meeting
Writing minutes from a five-hour recording usually means listening to most of it again.
- Hours spent scrubbing for one recorded vote
- Mover and seconder easy to miss in crosstalk
- Dollar amounts misheard in a noisy chamber
- Free tools that stop well before the second hour
- Subtitles from the video site with no punctuation
- A delegation’s comments lost in the middle
✓ The meeting as a document
One upload gives the clerk and the reporter the same text, timed to the same video.
- About 2 minutes per hour of meeting
- Chapters by agenda item with start times
- Councillors and staff named in the summary
- A chat that answers when the deferral was moved
- SRT captions for the archived video
- A file of up to 10 hours, no splitting
Sample
Part of a council meeting, as it returns.
Illustrative only: this exchange was written for this page and does not come from any real council. Timestamps count from the start of the stream.
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 questions clerks ask.
How long does a 5-hour council meeting take?
Around 10 minutes, at roughly 2 minutes per hour of audio. A 3-hour meeting is usually ready in about 6. You can start it the morning after and have the text before the coffee is cold.
What does a season of council meetings cost?
One 4-hour meeting is 240 minutes, so the $6 pack of 500 minutes covers two of them. Ten such meetings are 2,400 minutes, which is past the $12 pack, so a clerk planning the whole season would buy the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes. All prices are in US dollars, credits never expire, and there is no subscription.
Our recording is a large video file. Is that a problem?
Files up to 5 GB and 10 hours go in as one. Before the first pack, uploads stop at 2 GB, and a larger file starts once a pack is on the account. Pasting the YouTube or Drive link avoids moving the file at all.
The meeting ran past 10 hours. What then?
Upload it as two files, cut at a recess. Each comes back with its own timeline, and both together still fit a single pack in most cases. Most council meetings end well before that ceiling.
Can it handle a meeting held in English and French?
The recording is detected on its main language among 99 supported. Remarks made in the other language should be read against the audio before they go into the minutes. Where the stream offers a separate interpretation channel, that channel can be transcribed on its own.
Which exports do we get, and where does the audio go?
TXT and DOCX for the minutes, SRT and VTT for captioning the archived video, and JSON for a records system. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training.
Related
More civic recordings
Send the council meeting. The first 20 minutes of the meeting are free.
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