Meeting minutes free, straight from the recording
Record the meeting, upload it, and start from an accurate transcript instead of a blank page.
Last updated: September 2026
Trim it into clean minutes with decisions, owners and action items. No account, 10 recordings a day.
No account. 10 recordings a day. Files up to 60 minutes here, and it resets at midnight.
Plain transcript and subtitles right here. Bleeping, translation and burned-in subtitles live in the full tool.
From audio to usable minutes
You can't paste a recording into a document, but you can paste a transcript. ScribeGrab gives you the full text of the meeting so writing the minutes is editing, not typing from scratch: keep the decisions and action items, cut the small talk.
- Start from the real words, not your memory
- Never miss a decision or an owner
- Skim an hour-long meeting in two minutes
- Share the record with anyone who missed it
How to make minutes from a recording
- Record the meeting (Zoom/Teams/Meet local recording, or a voice recorder).
- Upload the file to ScribeGrab (up to 60 minutes / 1.5 GB).
- Download the transcript as TXT.
- Trim it into minutes: decisions, action items with owners, and dates.
Works with call recordings too
If your meeting was a video call, see transcribe a Zoom or Teams meeting for saving the recording. Everything you upload is deleted right after processing, so sensitive discussions stay private. See privacy.
From a labelled transcript to minutes people read
Be clear about what the transcript is: a complete record of everything said, in the order it was said, which is almost the opposite of minutes. Minutes are short, reordered and selective. Nobody reads an hour of dialogue to find out what they agreed to. The transcript is the raw material; the twenty minutes you spend after it is where the minutes happen.
Read more
The structure that works is the same one in every organisation that takes meetings seriously, and it has four parts. Decisions, what was actually settled, phrased so it still makes sense in six months. Actions, each with a single named owner and a date, because an action with two owners has none. Open questions, what was raised and deliberately not resolved, which is the part almost everyone drops and the part that causes the same discussion to happen again next month. And context, one or two lines on why a decision went the way it did, so the next person doesn't reopen it.
If you would rather not do that pass by hand, a month pass does two of these steps for you: it writes the first draft in exactly this shape, summary, key points, decisions, action items, open questions, and it lets you rename Speaker 1 to a real name once, after which the name is right in the transcript, the subtitles, the translations and the notes at the same time. You still read it through; it is a draft, not a record.
Related: Podcast episode summary.
That AI-written draft can carry the same stray typographic characters other AI writing tends to leave behind: a curly quote, a zero-width space. TextNinja's clean text tool strips those before the minutes go into Word or an email.
Everything else can go. The scheduling talk, the tangents, the three attempts at explaining the same point: none of it belongs in minutes. A good rule is that an hour-long meeting produces about a page. If yours is producing four, you're still transcribing rather than minuting.
Two mechanical things make this much faster. First, work from the speaker labels: ScribeGrab marks the voices as Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on, up to eight, so a commitment stays attached to whoever made it. Find-and-replace the labels with real names once, and every action item you lift already has its owner. Second, keep the SRT file: each line carries a timestamp, so a disputed decision can be checked at source rather than argued from memory. The click-to-play transcript does the same in the browser. Click a line, hear that moment: which is the fastest way to confirm the exact wording of something before you write it down as agreed.
Crosstalk, and the other things that go wrong
Meeting audio is the messiest audio there is, and knowing where it breaks tells you which parts of your minutes need a second look rather than making you distrust the whole document.
Crosstalk is the main one. When two people speak at once, the transcript usually keeps the louder voice and loses the quieter, and the line gets attributed to whoever won. That matters because interruptions cluster around exactly the moments where a decision is being made or challenged. If a decision looks like it came out of nowhere, that's the place to re-listen. Similar voices on similar headsets can be merged into one label, most often two men or two women in the same room on the same microphone; the giveaway is a "speaker" who appears to disagree with themselves. And a meeting with more than eight distinct voices falls back to plain unlabelled text, so for an all-hands or a large workshop expect a clean transcript without a cast list.
Read more
Room audio beats everything else. One laptop microphone at the end of a table of eight is the single biggest cause of a bad transcript, and no amount of processing fixes it afterwards. If the meeting is hybrid, the remote platform's own recording is usually far better than a phone on the table, because each participant is captured at their own microphone. If everyone is in one room, put the recorder in the middle rather than in front of the chair. And prefer an audio-only download when the platform offers one: it uploads faster and transcribes identically.
One limit to plan around: files go through in one pass up to 60 minutes. A longer workshop needs splitting in any free audio editor, which is no real hardship since you still get 10 recordings a day, and splitting at the natural break gives you two shorter documents to work through instead of one that nobody opens.
Combining minutes from several meetings into one document for reference later? ScanReviver's add page numbers stamps fresh numbers across the merged file.
Writing the minutes up in Word before you send them round? ScanReviver's Word to PDF locks the layout in first, so it opens the same on whichever machine reads it.
By Sam Ridder, I build and run ScribeGrab on my own hardware, on my own. Who I am.
Sources
- Minutes - Wikipedia: Minutes are the written record of a meeting
Frequently asked
Does it write the minutes for me?
Free, you get an accurate full transcript to work from, and once it's done a "Summarise this meeting" button gives you a short summary and the key points. With the €5 month pass it also writes a full first draft: summary, key points, decisions, action items and open questions, generated from your own transcript on our own computers. Read it before you send it round: it can miss a nuance or an owner, and you were the one in the room.
Can I upload a video call recording?
Yes. ScribeGrab pulls the audio from a video file automatically.
Is there a length limit?
Up to 60 minutes and 1.5 GB per file, 10 recordings a day.
Is the recording kept?
No. It's deleted right after processing; results wiped within 45 minutes (24 hours with any pass, free or paid).
Is turning audio into meeting minutes free?
The full transcript, speaker labels and a short summary with key points are free, 10 recordings a day, each up to 60 minutes and 1.5 GB. The full minutes draft with decisions and action items, the Word export and files over 60 minutes need the €5 pass. So there is a free AI meeting note taker part every day, not a trial, and the minutes AI draft is the paid extra.
Can I record meeting minutes directly from the audio?
Yes, after the meeting: upload the meeting recording and it becomes a labelled transcript first, and one click gives you the free summary. It replaces recording meeting minutes by hand while people are talking, and the transcript covers everything said, not just what a note-taker caught. Send the whole minutes recording; you trim the small talk when you write the minutes.
Is this a meeting minute taker I can trust for action items?
It works from your own transcript, so the summary, decisions and action items are only as good as what was said and recorded. Like any AI note taker, it can miss a nuance, a smaller decision buried in a tangent or an owner, so read it before you send it round.
Does it work as a meeting assistant during the call?
No. It can't join a call live; it works after the fact, from the recording. That's the difference with an AI meeting assistant that sits in your calendar: no bot in the call, no account, just the file afterwards.
What's the best way to record the meeting so the minutes come out clean?
Keep the recording device close to whoever is speaking and avoid two people talking at once; crosstalk is what most often garbles a speaker label or drops a decision. The call platform's own recording usually comes out clearer than a phone in the middle of the table.
Does the meeting recording need a special format?
No. Whatever your call platform or voice recorder saved (MP4, M4A, WAV, MP3) uploads directly, with no conversion first.
Is a meeting minutes audio to text conversion accurate enough to quote someone?
On clear audio, yes, but give names and numbers a quick proofread before you quote them. Meeting transcription separates speakers automatically, up to eight voices; past eight, or with only one voice, it leaves the labels off.
Does the minutes draft come out ready to paste?
The pass draft comes out as plain text with clear sections (decisions, actions, open questions), so pasting it into an email or Word needs only light formatting. The free summarizer gives a shorter version with the key points.
Is there a faster way to transcribe minutes than typing during the meeting?
Yes: record first, upload after, and let the transcript do the typing. Any recorded conversation works the same, from a formal meeting to a quick call or a voice memo debrief.
Can I get meeting notes AI writes, or just the raw transcript?
Both. The full transcript always downloads, so you can skip any summary and search everything that was said; the notes AI writes from it are the free summary or, with the pass, the full minutes draft.
How do I transcribe meeting audio into minutes?
Upload the recording, download the transcript and work from the speaker labels. Keep decisions, action items and who owns them, and cut the scheduling talk and tangents.
Is free meeting transcription limited to short meetings?
The limit is 60 minutes and 1.5 GB per file, with 10 recordings a day. A longer workshop needs splitting into parts, and the transcripts are easy to join afterwards.