Transcribe a recording made in a town hall the dais, the aisle microphone and the vote.
A town hall recording of a public meeting or hearing, often three hours or more, comes back as text at about 2 minutes per hour of audio, so a 3-hour session is ready in roughly 6 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, and the $6 pack of 500 minutes covers the rest of that meeting with 320 minutes left for the next one.
What the room does to the sound
A town hall is built for voices carrying to the back row, which is exactly what a recorder hears too.
Hard walls, long echo
Council chambers and civic halls tend to have plaster, wood panelling and high ceilings, so every word arrives twice: once directly and once off the walls. Speech taken from the PA or a desk microphone still comes back readable, and the run takes about 2 minutes per audio hour however much the room rings.
The public microphone
Residents speak from a stand-up microphone in the aisle, some leaning in and some a step back. Those passages land in the transcript at the minute each comment began, and the summary names a resident who gave their name for the record.
The arithmetic for one session
A 3-hour meeting uses 180 of the 500 minutes in a $6 pack. A clerk covering ten 3-hour sessions a year needs 1,800 minutes, which the $12 pack of 2,000 holds. Credits never expire, so an irregular meeting calendar costs nothing extra.
The agenda becomes chapters
Chapters follow where the discussion turned, which in a public meeting usually tracks the agenda: call to order, reports, public comment, each motion. A budget figure or a hearing date said aloud is pulled into the list of names, numbers and dates.
Why town hall audio goes wrong
The meeting was public. Getting it into text should not take a week.
✗ Typing it up from the stream
Most minutes are written from memory, or from a recording someone replays at double speed over several evenings.
- Three hours of replay for three hours of meeting
- Public comments paraphrased or skipped
- Upload caps well under a full session
- A monthly plan for a body that meets monthly
- No timestamp to find a disputed remark
- Echo that makes auto captions drift
✓ One upload per session
The whole meeting goes in once and comes back as one document, with one clock running from the gavel.
- About 6 minutes for a 3-hour session
- The first 20 minutes free
- A whole hearing in one file, up to 10 hours or 5 GB
- Residents and officials named in the summary, quotes and chapters
- Motions, figures and dates in one list
- Exports for the minutes, captions or an archive
Sample
A public meeting, at the comment period.
This sample is illustrative and was written for this page, not taken from any real meeting. The timestamps show where a passage sits in a three-hour session.
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
Town hall recordings, the questions people ask.
How long does a town hall recording take to transcribe?
Roughly 2 minutes for every hour of the meeting. A 3-hour meeting is usually ready in about 6 minutes, and a 5-hour hearing in about 10. You can leave the page while it runs, and the transcript waits in your Library.
What does a 3-hour meeting cost?
A first-time visitor gets the first 20 minutes free, and the rest goes on a pack. The $6 pack holds 500 minutes, so one 3-hour session uses 180 and leaves 320. Every price is in USD, and nothing renews.
Our meeting is streamed on YouTube. Do I have to download the video first?
No. Paste the YouTube link, live replays included, and the audio is fetched from there. If the stream ran past 6 hours, it starts once a pack is on the account.
The camera file is huge. Will it upload?
The ceiling is 10 hours or 5 GB per file, whichever comes first. Before the first pack, uploads up to 2 GB start straight away, and a bigger file starts once a pack is on the account. A hearing that ran past 10 hours goes in as two files.
Some residents spoke another language. What happens?
99 languages are detected automatically, and the recording is transcribed on its main language. When an interpreter repeats a comment in English, that English comes back as spoken.
Is this an official record, and who hears the audio?
It is an AI transcript with timestamps for drafting minutes, not a certified record of the proceedings. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training. Download it as TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT or JSON.
Related
More public meetings
Send the meeting. The first 20 minutes of the meeting are free.
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