4 Steps To Create and Transcribe Meeting Minutes

Whether it’s for work or school, meetings tend to become complex and long-winded, making meeting minutes a necessity. Typically, you start creating meeting minutes from note-taking during the meeting. However, this can take away from the flow of the discussion if you’re also part of the meeting.

A more efficient way is by transcribing the minutes of your meetings. This allows you to fully focus on the meeting itself while capturing every single detail.

Here’s how you can do it in four steps:

1.) Set up the recording

Transcriptions always require audio recordings which ideally capture every speaker’s input clearly. To achieve a high-quality recording, you need:

• A quiet environment with little to no background noise
• Your speakers to sit around the same spot
• A recording device that captures all directions

These are important to make the later transcription process much easier. You can coordinate with your colleagues to ensure that your current meeting setup will be more conducive to transcription.

For your recording device, it’s best to use a high-quality omnidirectional microphone that captures sounds from all directions clearly. Otherwise, you can use a mobile phone with a good built-in microphone to have a workable recording. In any case, make sure that your device has enough battery capacity and storage space to avoid having an incomplete recording.

If the meeting is virtual, setting up the recording is a breeze. You can use the built-in recording feature that comes in most video conferencing platforms.

2.) Record the meeting

Before you start recording, it’s important that you ask for consent or inform each participant that you’ll record the meeting to create the minutes.

Here are a few pointers to remember when you begin to record the meeting:

• Make sure that your recording device is right at the center of all the speakers to record all of their inputs clearly
• Remind all of the participants to speak at a high enough volume for your recording device to pick up their words
• Advise them to avoid making unnecessary noises or nudge the table in order to minimize noise and maintain the quality of the recording’

Once the meeting is over, stop recording and send the recording file to your computer or laptop for transcription.

The next steps require a lot of time and effort on your part. If you want to enjoy the benefits of transcribing the minutes of your meeting while focusing on your other tasks, use TranscriptionWing to transcribe your meeting minutes for you and receive accurate, high-quality transcripts done in as short as four hours.

3.) Transcribe the meeting

While you can go straight to creating the minutes, it’s highly advisable to fully transcribe the audio first. The transcript can serve as a strong reference point to ensure the accuracy of your meeting minutes. It can also help greatly in informing your next business decision.

The transcription process itself may be tedious and time-consuming, but with the right steps, it can be highly rewarding.

Here’s how:

1. Use any computer or laptop.
2. Open the audio recording with the media player of your choice.
3. Open the word processor of your choice for the transcription.
4. Place the two programs side by side. For best effect, utilize the split app functionality in Windows or macOS.
5. Play the audio recording and start typing out the discussion. For each line, you can use a basic format like [hour:minute:second], the name of the speaker, then the line itself (e.g. “[01:13:01] Jane Doe: The success of this strategy depends on the stock market trends for next month“)
6. Rewind the audio as necessary to listen carefully to the audio. This is especially when there’s crosstalk, background noise, or other forms of complex audio.
7. When you’re done transcribing. save the file.

4.) Create the minutes

With a transcript in hand, you now have a strong reference point for creating your meeting minutes as well as other documents. This is especially because reading text tends to be much faster than listening to audio. Plus, you can use the search function to quickly navigate through the transcript and find the desired key points.

TranscriptionWing can transcribe your meeting minutes for you

Transcribing minutes of meetings is challenging because of the urgency and the tedium. You have other tasks to deal with, and there are other audio recordings to transcribe into meeting minutes. Instead of risking burnout, it’s best to use TranscriptionWing as your transcription service of choice to transcribe your meeting audio for you. Just send your audio recording, and you get a high-quality transcript and meeting minutes done for you in the way you want.