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As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly transcribe your meeting.
This still needs a person who signs their name to it.
Can you do it?
5 minutesto a draft.
30 minutesto something you’d act on.
Cost, all in£0
Skill needednone
Who has to check ityou
What the alternative costsA purpose-built AI meeting-notes service such as Otter.ai records, transcribes and summarises meetings automatically.
If this goes wrong, a missed qualification or wrongly attributed action can lead to confusion, a missed deadline or a dispute about what was agreed.
What to actually do
Hand it to a person
The route this page recommends
A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.
Use a tool built for this
Second choiceDo it yourself
The distant thirdA chat interface, no skill needed, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.
How to actually do it
- Tell every attendee that the meeting will be recorded and transcribed, obtain the agreement required by your workplace policy, and confirm where the recording will be stored and who can access it.
- Open the recording from Teams, Zoom, your phone or your meeting recorder and export the clearest audio file available.
- Gather the meeting title, date, attendee names, speaker order if known, acronyms and specialist terms that may be difficult to recognise.
- Upload the audio file and paste the prompt into an AI transcription or meeting-notes tool, then add the meeting context in the bracketed slot.
- Play the recording while checking every decision, action, owner, deadline, name and quoted statement in the generated transcript, correcting errors rather than accepting inferred wording.
- Send the corrected transcript or minutes to the chair and relevant attendees, clearly marking it as a draft if the meeting has not formally approved its record.
Prompt
Transcribe the meeting recording I provide. Produce three sections: 1) a faithful transcript with timestamps and speaker labels where the audio supports them, 2) a concise summary of the main discussion, and 3) a table of decisions, actions, owners and deadlines. Do not invent words, names, decisions, owners or dates. Mark unclear audio as [inaudible] and uncertain speaker identity as [speaker uncertain]. Keep direct quotes separate from summaries. Preserve disagreements and qualifications rather than smoothing them out. Treat the transcript as a draft that must be checked against the recording. Meeting context: [meeting title, date, organisation and relevant names or terms].
Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.
What it gets wrong
- It cannot obtain valid consent from attendees or decide whether recording is permitted under your workplace policy.
- It mishears names, acronyms, overlapping speech and quiet audio, especially when several people speak at once.
- It cannot know whether a hesitant comment was a firm decision, a suggestion or an unresolved disagreement without meeting context.
- It does not carry responsibility for confidential information being uploaded or for an inaccurate action record being circulated.
- It cannot cheaply verify every sentence for you because that requires listening back to the recording.
What caps this at PARTLY: consent and privacy, verification cost and real time truth.
How we scored this
Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 2 |
| Inputs | 1 |
| Verification | 1 |
| Liability | 1 |
| Effort delta | 2 |
| Total | 7 / 10 |
The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.
FAQ
- Can AI transcribe a recorded meeting?
- Yes. Current meeting tools can produce a transcript, speaker labels, timestamps, summaries and action lists from a recording. Treat the result as a draft and check important passages against the audio.
- Can I use AI to transcribe a meeting without telling people?
- Do not assume you can. Tell attendees, follow your organisation's recording policy and obtain the required agreement before recording or uploading the meeting.
- Is AI transcription accurate enough for meeting minutes?
- It is useful for a first draft, but it can mishear names, figures, specialist terms and overlapping speech. Check every decision, action, owner and deadline against the recording before circulating the minutes.
- What is the best AI tool for meeting transcription?
- Otter.ai is a suitable purpose-built option because it records, transcribes and summarises meetings automatically. The best choice still depends on your organisation's approved tools, recording permissions and data-handling requirements.
Nearby answers
Assessed by gpt-5.6-luna (gpt-5.6-luna) on 2026-08-13, second-checked by an independent model. Wrong somewhere? Email [email protected] and it gets re-checked.
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