Transcribe city council meetings and start the minutes from the brief.
A US city council meeting often runs 3 to 6 hours, and WhipScribe returns a 5-hour recording in about 10 minutes, with motions, votes and agenda items laid out in the brief. Five hours is 300 minutes, which fits the $6 pack of 500 minutes, and the first 20 minutes are free.
From the dais to the minutes
A long public meeting, turned into a record staff and residents can use.
Long agendas, one file
Council meetings run long when there is a contested zoning item or a full public comment period. The whole meeting goes in as one recording of up to 10 hours, so the consent calendar and the last item of new business share one timeline.
The brief as a start on the minutes
The brief lists what was moved, who seconded where it was stated, the outcomes announced and the dates set. That gives the clerk a draft to correct against the record rather than a blank page; the approved minutes remain the clerk's work. upload page
Link or file
If the city posts meeting video on YouTube, including live replays, paste the link and nothing needs uploading. A replay longer than 6 hours starts once a pack is on the account. If the video lives only on the city's own site, download it and upload the file.
A year of meetings, priced
Monthly meetings of about 4 hours add up to 2,880 minutes a year, which fits the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes with room for committee meetings too. A single meeting of up to 8 hours fits the $6 pack.
Why council recordings stay unsearchable
The video is public; finding one vote in it is not easy.
✗ Video and memory
Reporters, staff and residents scrub through hours of meeting video to find one discussion, or rely on notes taken at the time.
- Five hours of video to find one item
- Auto-captions with no agenda structure
- Public comment speakers nobody can find again
- Minutes written days later from notes
- Tools that cap a file at an hour
- No search across a year of meetings
✓ Each meeting, structured
The recording comes back with agenda items as chapters and the decisions in the brief.
- Near 10 minutes for a 5-hour meeting
- Chapters for each agenda item
- Council members named in the summary and quotes
- Motions, votes and dates pulled out
- Chat that finds where an item was discussed
- DOCX for the clerk, captions for the video
Sample
Part of a council meeting, transcribed.
An illustrative sample written for this page; it is not from any real city or council member. Timestamps run from the call to order.
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 5-hour council meeting take to transcribe?
Close to 10 minutes; each audio hour takes about 2. A 3-hour meeting takes about 6.
What do council meetings cost to transcribe over a year?
One 5-hour meeting is 300 minutes from the $6 pack of 500. Twelve monthly meetings of 4 hours are 2,880 minutes, which fits the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes. A city that records council, planning and committee meetings every week may prefer the $19 Workspace.
The meeting video is huge. Do I have to download and upload it?
Not if it is on YouTube: paste the link. A downloaded file can be up to 2 GB before the first pack and 5 GB after one, with a limit of 10 hours per file.
A meeting ran past 10 hours. What then?
Upload it as two files, split at a recess. Each part comes back with its own transcript and chapters.
Some residents spoke Spanish during public comment. Will that work?
The recording is detected on its main language among 99. Comments in another language within an English meeting follow the main language of the recording, so check those passages against the video.
Can we publish the transcript, and is the recording private?
Exports are DOCX, TXT, SRT, VTT and JSON, and publishing is your decision. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training.
Related
Related
Paste the meeting link. Agenda items as chapters.
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