Transcribe council meetings in New Zealand and draft the minutes from the brief.
A council meeting in New Zealand often runs three to six hours, and a 6-hour recording comes back as text in about 12 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, the $6 pack of 500 minutes covers the full 360 minutes, and the brief lists the decisions, figures and dates to draft minutes from.
From meeting to minutes
A long civic meeting, returned as a record the minute-taker can draft from.
From the stream link
If the meeting was streamed to YouTube, paste the link to the replay and nothing has to be downloaded. A file from your own recording system uploads directly, up to 10 hours or 5 GB. A streamed meeting longer than 6 hours starts once a pack is on the account.
Minutes from the brief
The brief sets out the decisions and takeaways, and a separate list gathers every figure, date and address read into the record, each with a timestamp. The minute-taker writes the resolution wording, and the transcript confirms what was moved and when.
Agenda items as chapters
The opening, the public forum, the reports and each agenda item come back as chapters with start times. A resident who cares only about the item on their street can go straight to it, and staff can link to the chapter time.
A year of meetings
Twenty 4-hour meetings in a year come to 4,800 minutes, which the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes covers at $0.29 per audio hour. An office recording several committees every week can consider the $19 monthly Workspace.
Why meeting recordings rarely get read
The stream is public, but nobody sits through six hours to find one decision.
✗ A long video and nothing else
Without text, the recording answers no questions unless someone watches it end to end.
- Six hours of video with no index
- Minutes drafted from live notes only
- Captions without chapters or a brief
- A transcription quote per meeting
- Submitters' points summarised from memory
- Searching for one item by scrubbing
✓ A meeting record you can search
The recording returns as text with chapters, so any item can be found, quoted and linked.
- About 12 minutes for 6 hours
- Agenda items as chapters
- Decisions and figures listed
- Councillors named in summary and quotes
- SRT and VTT to caption the replay
- DOCX for the minutes draft
Sample
A council meeting, agenda item by agenda item.
This sample is illustrative, written for this page, and it does not quote a real council, councillor or submitter. Labels mark chapters, and speakers are named in the summary and quotes.
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, answered.
How long does a 6-hour council meeting take?
About 12 minutes, and a 3-hour meeting around 6. When the recording comes from a stream link, the clock starts once we have fetched it.
What does a council meeting cost to transcribe?
A 4-hour meeting is 240 minutes, and two of them fit in the $6 pack of 500 minutes at $0.72 per audio hour. A full year of meetings usually belongs on the $12 or $24 pack, depending on the total minutes. All amounts are in US dollars.
The meeting was split into morning and afternoon recordings. Do I join them?
Either way works. Two separate files each get their own timeline, and one joined file keeps a single clock for the day, as long as it stays under 10 hours and 5 GB. Before a first pack, uploads go up to 2 GB.
Can the brief replace the minutes?
No, and it is not meant to. It gives the minute-taker the decisions, the figures, the motion wording as spoken, and timestamps to check against. The formal minutes are still written and confirmed by the council in the usual way.
How are te reo Māori openings and passages handled?
Te reo Māori is one of the supported languages, and English is detected automatically. A meeting is transcribed on its main language, so a mihi, karakia or submission in te reo inside an English meeting should get one review against the audio.
Is the recording kept private, and what can I export?
Council recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training. Exports are DOCX, TXT, SRT, VTT and JSON, and a recording and its transcript can be deleted at any time.
Related
Related civic recordings
Paste the stream link. Start the minutes from the brief.
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