How to get something useful out of a meeting transcript

First, get a transcript

Audio is not among the file types OpenAI lists for uploads, so the recording itself is not the route.

Most meeting tools now produce transcripts automatically. Failing that, any transcription tool handles an hour of audio in a few minutes. What you want out of it is a text file, ideally with speaker labels and timestamps.

Ask for the right four things

Instead of a summary:

From this meeting transcript, give me four sections.

Decisions: what was actually decided, with who decided it. Commitments: who agreed to do what, by when if a date was mentioned. Say "no date given" where there is not one. Open questions: what was raised and left unresolved. Disagreements: where people did not agree, and what each position was.

Quote the line each item came from. If something is not present, say so rather than inferring it.

That structure works because it maps to what a meeting is for. The "no date given" instruction is worth keeping: an undated commitment is a finding, and without permission to say so it tends to get a plausible date attached.

The questions worth asking after that

What did everyone avoid?

What was raised and then dropped without resolution?

Meetings are full of these and nobody writes them down, because they are absences.

Who actually committed to something?

List every person who took on an action, and everyone present who took on nothing.

Uncomfortable and useful in equal measure.

Was anything decided twice?

Does this transcript revisit any decision more than once, and did the answer change?

What would someone who missed this need to know?

Good framing, because it forces relevance over completeness.

Handling a long transcript

An hour of speech is roughly ten thousand words, which goes in comfortably. A full day, or a series of meetings, can pass 2 million tokens and get truncated with no warning.

The check is the same as for any long document. Ask what the last thing discussed was. If it cannot say, it did not reach the end, and any list of commitments is missing whatever was agreed in the last twenty minutes, which is usually where commitments happen.

Across several meetings

Process each one separately into the same four-section structure, then bring the structured notes together:

Here are structured notes from six weekly meetings. Which commitments were made and never mentioned again? Which topics keep returning without resolution?

That second question is the valuable one. A topic appearing in five consecutive meetings without a decision is a real signal about the project, and it is invisible from inside any single meeting.

What transcripts lose

Worth knowing before you rely on one.

Tone, hesitation, and who sounded unconvinced. A transcript records that someone said yes. It does not record that they said it flatly after a long pause, which everyone in the room understood perfectly.

For content and commitments, a transcript is better than the recording: searchable, quotable, and checkable. For reading the room, it is not, and no prompt recovers what was never written down.