You just walked out of a one-hour meeting. Roughly 9,000 words were spoken (at 150 words per minute), and you remember three of them. Transcribing a meeting with AI means turning that audio into text in a few minutes, then asking an assistant to produce structured minutes: decisions made, action items, owners, deadlines. No technical skills required, and two of the methods below cost nothing.
This guide gives you four methods, from the most complete to the simplest, the exact prompt that makes the difference between a vague summary and minutes people can actually use, and the rules to know before you hit record (participant consent isn't optional). Each method is laid out step by step, with its real limits: maximum length, quality on a six-person meeting, and how it handles accents and industry jargon.
Method 1: do everything inside Skilzy's AI Lab
The most complete approach is to chain transcription and minute-writing in a single environment, with credits already included, instead of juggling three subscriptions. That's the idea behind the AI Lab built into Skilzy: you get access to real AI tools right from the platform, you learn the method while you use it, and you don't pay a separate subscription for every step.
Here's how it works, in five steps:
- Record the meeting. A phone in the middle of the table is enough for six people in a normal room. For video calls, start your meeting tool's recording.
- Grab the audio file. Universal formats: MP3, M4A, WAV.
- Transcribe the audio into text. You'll get a raw block, punctuation won't be perfect, and some words will be misheard. That's normal, and it won't cause problems later.
- Apply the minutes prompt (the one in section 5 of this article). The assistant cleans things up, structures the content, and pulls out decisions and action items.
- Proofread and fix. Budget two to three minutes. Check the numbers, the proper nouns, and the deadlines: those are the three places AI gets it wrong most often.
For a one-hour meeting, the whole thing lands around 10 to 15 minutes, versus 45 to 90 minutes of writing it by hand.
One thing worth knowing before you sign up: two state-recognized certifications are eligible for funding (RS7439 for AI-assisted content marketing, RS6792 for AI and sales) if you want to go further than meeting minutes.
The real value for a beginner isn't the tool — it's the method. Knowing how to phrase the request is 80% of the result. If you want a wider overview before you choose, start with our guide to learning AI as a complete beginner.
Method 2: the transcription already on your phone (free)
Your phone can probably turn a voice recording into text for free, with no extra app at all. It's the fastest option for a short meeting, and it would be dishonest not to mention it.
On iPhone (iOS 18 and later): open the Voice Memos app, record, then tap the transcription icon at the top of the recording. The text appears, and you can copy and paste it into an AI assistant.
On Android: the Recorder app on Pixel phones transcribes live, including offline. On Samsung, the Voice Recorder app offers a “Speech to text” mode. On other brands, open Google Docs, then Tools, then Voice typing.
What this method does well: it's free, it's instant, and in most cases the audio stays on the device.
Its limits, plainly stated:
- It doesn't tell speakers apart. You get one block of text with no idea who said what.
- Quality drops fast if several people talk at once or the room echoes.
- Past 30 or 40 minutes, the text gets hard to use as-is.
- It produces no minutes at all. You still need an AI assistant for the summarizing step.
Method 3: your video tool's built-in transcription
If your meeting is on Teams, Google Meet, or Zoom, transcription is already built in, and it labels speakers by name. That's an advantage the other methods don't have, because the tool already knows who's connected.
- Microsoft Teams: during the meeting, open the “More actions” menu, then “Start transcription.” The text is timestamped and attributed to each participant, then archived with the meeting.
- Google Meet: transcripts are available depending on your organization's Google Workspace edition, and the document lands in the organizer's Drive.
- Zoom: audio transcription is enabled in the account settings, on the cloud recording side, on paid plans.
One thing to watch: these features depend on your work subscription and on what your IT administrator has allowed. On a free account, they're often unavailable. Check before the meeting, not during it.
And once you've got the transcript, the job isn't done. A one-hour Teams transcript easily runs 40,000 characters, unreadable as-is. You go back through an AI assistant for the summary.
Method 4: specialized third-party tools
Dedicated transcription tools are the most accurate on long, multilingual meetings, but they add one more subscription or require a technical setup.
Three families, depending on your profile:
Consumer web tools (Notta, Tactiq, Fireflies, Happy Scribe). You upload a file or hook them up to your video call. They tell speakers apart and often offer an automatic summary. Almost all have a free tier capped at a certain number of minutes per month, then a monthly subscription. Worth noting: your audio goes to their servers. Read up on where the data is hosted before you send them a confidential meeting.
Whisper, the open source model. Released under the MIT license, Whisper is publicly documented on GitHub and installs on your own computer. Free, no length limit, and the audio never leaves your machine. In exchange, you'll have to use the terminal and accept processing times that depend on your hardware. It's the best option if confidentiality is non-negotiable and a command line doesn't scare you.
Assistants that connect to your calendar and join meetings on their own. Handy, but a bot that invites itself into a meeting without anyone announcing it raises a genuine consent problem. Avoid it without explicit agreement from the team.
Quick comparison of the four methods
| Method | Entry cost | Identifies speakers | Structured minutes | Level required |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skilzy AI Lab | Monthly subscription | Via the prompt and your notes | Yes, with the method provided | Beginner |
| Phone (built-in) | Free | No | No | Beginner |
| Video meeting tool | Included depending on your work plan | Yes | Partial | Beginner |
| Third-party tool / Whisper | Limited free tier or local install | Yes | Often | Intermediate |
The prompt that turns 9,000 words into readable minutes
Good minutes don't come from the transcription tool but from the prompt you write next: ask for a precise structure and named action items, never “summarize this meeting.” “Summarize” produces a lukewarm paragraph nobody will read. Here's a template to copy and paste above your transcript:
You are writing the minutes of a meeting from the raw transcript below. The transcript contains speech recognition errors: fix them when the meaning is obvious, and flag uncertain passages in brackets.
Produce exactly these five blocks:
- Context in 3 lines maximum (purpose of the meeting, identifiable participants).
- Decisions made: one bullet per decision, phrased in the past tense and stated affirmatively.
- Action items: a table with Action, Owner, Deadline. If the owner or deadline isn't stated in the transcript, write “to be confirmed.” Do not make anything up.
- Open questions: topics raised without a conclusion.
- Useful quotes: a maximum of 3 short verbatim quotes worth keeping exactly as they were said.
Constraints: 400 words maximum in total, factual tone, no evaluative adjectives. Ignore off-topic digressions.
Transcript: [paste here]
Three tweaks that change the result:
- Give it the participant list and your industry jargon before the transcript. The AI will write “GDPR” instead of “gee dee pee are,” and get the proper nouns in your field right.
- Explicitly forbid invention. The instruction “don't make anything up, write to be confirmed” cuts down a lot on action items assigned to the wrong person.
- Split it up if the meeting runs past 90 minutes. Process the transcript in two or three chunks, then ask for a merge of the partial minutes.
Which assistant you pick matters less than the prompt, but it does matter a little. Our comparison of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini on their free plans breaks down which one handles long texts best. And if you want to practice without spending anything, we've rounded up 15 free resources.
Before you hit record: consent and data
Recording a work meeting without telling the participants is illegal in France, whatever transcription method you use. Three habits are enough to stay on the right side of the rules.
Announce the recording and what it's for. One sentence at the start: “I'm recording this so I can write up the minutes, and the audio will be deleted once they're approved. Is everyone okay with that?” If someone says no, you take notes instead. Participants must be informed before you start, and must be able to object.
Limit how long you keep it. Keep the minutes, delete the audio and the raw transcript once the document is approved. Data minimization sits at the heart of GDPR as France's CNIL explains it: you only keep what's necessary, for as long as it's necessary.
Be careful with sensitive meetings. One-on-ones, health data, salary information, confidential client files: in those cases, either you stay with a local solution (phone in offline mode, Whisper on your own machine) or you don't record at all. A free online service is not the right place for a performance review.
One last point people often forget: tell everyone the minutes were written with AI help, and have someone who was in the room read them over. Minutes signed off by a human commit their author, not the tool.
Key takeaways
Four methods, one principle: transcription is the easy part, the minutes come from the prompt. Start with whichever method fits your situation best, test it on a short, low-stakes meeting, then tune the prompt until you get a document your colleagues actually read.
