How do you turn a meeting transcript into minutes?

Turn a transcript into minutes by writing down only what was decided: each motion with its exact wording, who moved it and the result, and each action with an owner and a due date. Then check every entry against the audio. Minutes are a record of what was done, not what was said, so do not paste the transcript or an AI summary in as the minutes.

Minutes record what was done, not what was said

The usual rule for clubs, boards and councils comes from Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised. It says the minutes "should contain mainly a record of what was done at the meeting, not what was said by the members." ¹ The shorter companion guide adds that the most frequent mistakes are "trying to summarize the reports offered and arguments made in debate" ². A transcript is raw material for the minutes, not the minutes themselves.

The three documents do different jobs:

An AI summary can leave points out or add ones nobody made, so check it

Summaries are where errors get in. The clearest data come from clinical notes, not meetings. In a 2025 study of AI-generated clinical notes, 3.45 percent of the clinically relevant content from the visit was left out ³, and 1.47 percent of the content was hallucinated, meaning it was not supported by the sources ⁴. A 2026 UC Davis pilot of AI scribe notes found hallucinations in 11.5 percent of the 356 reviewed notes ⁵. A meeting summary is not a clinical note, so those rates do not transfer directly. The lesson does: an AI summary is a draft, and someone must check it against the audio before a decision depends on it.

Steps to turn a transcript into minutes

1. Read your group's rules. Check the bylaws and whether Robert's Rules applies. Some groups set their own minutes rules.
2. Choose the transcript style. If you need the cleaned text, a clean verbatim transcript removes fillers and false starts before you start writing.
3. Mark each decision point. Find the timestamps where a motion was made, debated and voted on, and play the audio around each one.
4. Write each motion exactly. Record the wording of the motion, who moved it, and the result of the vote.
5. Write each action. Record the task, the owner and the due date, all taken from the audio, not from memory.
6. Leave out the debate. Opinions, arguments and most reports belong in the discussion, not in the minutes, unless your rules say otherwise.
7. Get the minutes approved. The chair or secretary reviews the draft, and the group approves it at its next meeting.

Keep the audio for as long as your records policy requires. The minutes are the official record, and the audio is the proof behind it.

It depends on the kind of group, and on consent for recorded meetings

A board's minutes can be a legal document, so the wording must match the motions exactly. A team's weekly check-in can use a shorter list of actions. Both start from the same principle.

If the meeting was recorded, the rules on consent still apply. Everyone should have known the meeting was being transcribed, and in California every party must agree to a recording of a confidential conversation. Our guide to meeting transcription covers consent and the tools that create transcripts.

If you want to draft the minutes by speaking, Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows. It types your words into the document you are writing. It does not transcribe meetings, so use a transcript from another tool and dictate the minutes from it.

For the other ways to get a meeting transcript, see how to transcribe an in-person meeting and whether there is a free meeting transcription app.