Transcribe council meeting recordings and draft the minutes.
A council or community meeting recorded in South Africa usually runs three to six hours, and a six-hour meeting comes back as text in about 12 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, a $6 pack of 500 minutes covers the whole sitting, and the brief gives the secretary a first draft of the minutes.
From recording to minutes
The decisions of a long sitting, written down before the next agenda goes out.
A brief to draft from
The brief states what the meeting was about and its main takeaways. Combined with the chapter list, it is the skeleton of the minutes, and the secretary fills in the formal wording.
Resolutions and amounts listed
Every budget figure, date and name said aloud is pulled into one list. Checking that the minutes carry the right amount for an item becomes a two-minute job.
Agenda items as chapters
The meeting is split into chapters with timestamps, which usually follow the agenda. A ward councillor who asks about one item can be pointed to the exact minute.
Six hours on one $6 pack
Six hours is 360 minutes, inside the 500 on the $6 pack. Video files from the chamber camera can be large; send them through upload page.
Why minutes run late
A secretary should not have to relisten to six hours to write one page.
✗ Minutes from memory and notes
Long meetings with many speakers leave the minute-taker relying on notes taken while also following the debate. By the time the draft circulates, members remember the debate differently.
- Six hours of audio to relisten
- Figures copied down wrong
- Items that ran over not recorded
- A recording too long to upload elsewhere
- No timestamps when a member disputes a line
- Minutes ready weeks later
✓ A text of the whole sitting
The minute-taker starts from the full text and a brief instead of a blank page.
- About 12 minutes for the sitting
- Brief and chapters as the outline
- Amounts and dates in one list
- Councillors named in the summary and quotes
- Search for any ward or item
- DOCX ready to edit
Sample
A council meeting excerpt, as it comes back.
This excerpt is illustrative and written for this page; it is not from a real council or meeting.
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 six-hour council meeting take?
About 12 minutes, at roughly 2 minutes per hour of audio, and a three-hour meeting about 6. You can upload at the end of the sitting and have text the same evening.
What does a year of council meetings cost?
Twelve monthly meetings of five hours each are 60 hours, or 3,600 minutes, which the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes covers. A single meeting of up to eight hours fits on the $6 pack of 500 minutes. All prices are in US dollars and the credits never expire.
Can it write the minutes for us?
It gives you the material: a brief with the main points, chapters, the figures and dates said, and the full text. The formal minutes, with their wording and approvals, are still written and adopted by the council's own process.
The meeting was streamed. Can I paste the link?
Yes, for a YouTube stream or a Google Drive share link, with no upload needed. A stream replay over 6 hours starts once a pack is on the account. A Facebook replay has to be downloaded first and then uploaded.
Which languages come through?
Afrikaans, Zulu and English are all detected without a setting, out of 99 languages. A meeting that changes language between speakers is detected on its main language.
Which files can I download, and is the recording private?
The minute-taker can download TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT or JSON. Council recordings are transcribed on our own servers and never used for training, and they stay in your Library until you delete them.
Related
Other civic recordings
Send the sitting. Start the minutes from the brief.
Transcribe a council meetingOperated by Neugence Technology Pvt. Ltd. · contact@whipscribe.com · Security · Privacy · Terms