AI meeting minutes from a recording

Why this case in particular

Nobody likes taking minutes. The council meeting, the site meeting, the client consultation, the weekly team call: everywhere people talk, and afterwards someone sits there in the evening typing it all up. This is the first case where three tools mesh: transcription produces the text, an agent turns it into a draft, and a workflow does both without being asked.

Two things have to be in place, and they sit in different places. Transcription, agents and workflows are switched off in a new organization; Datenmassiv AI switches them on, not your own team: a short conversation, no application form. Once that is done, your role decides whether the menu item appears for you, and your own administrator assigns it: Workflows is only visible to people whose role includes the View workflows permission, and the standard role "Member" does not. Sort out both before you follow the steps below.

The first question at a German company is never "how accurately does it recognize speech?" but "are we even allowed to do this?" That is why the legal notice comes before your very first recording.

Datenmassiv AI reminds you once that recording conversations without the consent of everyone involved is not permitted in Germany (Section 201 of the German Criminal Code, StGB), and that recordings of employees may be subject to the works council's right of co-determination (Section 87 of the Works Constitution Act, BetrVG). You confirm with a checkbox that all participants were informed and agreed. This confirmation is stored and can be withdrawn at any time under Settings in the page header; Datenmassiv AI then asks again before the next recording.

Step 1: Record the meeting

Open Transcription in the sidebar and click New recording.
Choose the Type of meeting, for example Meeting minutes, Site meeting or Council meeting, and add participants and an agenda if needed.
Choose File for an existing recording (up to 500 MB), Recording for the microphone, or Live for text that appears while the conversation is still going.
Set the language of the conversation.
Record, and finish with Stop recording.

The type decides the form the result takes; you do not need to have anything regenerated afterwards. An agenda becomes the structure of the minutes, and participant names help the AI assign speakers wherever the conversation makes them recognizable.

Nine languages are available: German, English (US and UK), French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Polish. If you are not sure of the language or people switch during the conversation, choose Detect automatically. With Live, recognition runs continuously and follows a language switch mid-conversation; with a file or a recording, Datenmassiv AI determines the language from the material.

There are two practical limits to know. A recording can be as long as your organization has set (120 minutes by default, four hours at most technically); the page tells you the number, and the recorder stops by itself so nothing gets lost. A live session lasts two hours at most; record longer sessions in two parts. The second limit is the reassuring one: recording in the browser saves automatically every 15 seconds, so if the computer crashes halfway through, what was said is still there.

The recording, not the recognition, decides the quality. Background noise, several people talking at once and strong dialect noticeably lower accuracy. A hall full of running machines is a different case from four people around a table microphone. We cannot give you reliable numbers for your environment: first record ten minutes where you actually plan to use it, and look at the result.

One tip that saves you a puzzled moment: below three speech segments, nothing further happens. A 20-second test recording gets no summary, is not archived and does not start a workflow.

Step 2: What happens without you

As soon as processing is complete, several things start on their own.

Datenmassiv AI gives the recording a title based on its content, so you can find it in the list again. If you change it yourself, your version stays.
A summary is created in the chosen type: who attended, what it was about, what was agreed. It is visibly marked as "AI-generated", in the app and in every export, as Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires.
The recording moves into your personal archive "My recordings" and can be searched there.
If you set the visibility to Team, it also goes into the shared archive "Team recordings", which every member of your organization can query.
If the conversation belongs to a project, file it in that project's knowledge base with Process transcript further → File in knowledge base; filing it again updates the document.

The last point has a property that matters day to day: if you withdraw the sharing, the recording disappears from the team archive again. The database handles that itself, not a cleanup job you would have to wait for.

Step 3: Correct it and choose the right form

The draft is created without you; the final version is not. In our experience, expect about ten minutes of rework for an hour-long meeting, more if the recording quality is poor.

Click a segment to edit its text directly.
Rename speakers by their name, reassign individual sections, or merge two speakers if recognition split one person in two.
Fix a recurring error, such as a misheard surname, in one go with Find & replace.
Watch for the subtly highlighted passages: recognition was unsure there, and that is where proofreading pays off most.

If you need a different form from the one chosen before recording, switch the template. Nine are available: Summary, Meeting minutes, File note, Consultation note, Order / quote, Customer meeting, Site meeting, Council meeting and Employee review. The same recording can become formal committee minutes or a short note for the file; participants and agenda are kept.

Step 4: Ask instead of rereading

With Ask AI → Ask here you ask questions right next to the transcript; any answer can jump to its point in the conversation. Continue in AI Chat opens AI chat with this recording as a reference, and you can add further documents. Whether you are allowed to see the recording is checked again by the server with every question, not just by the interface.

Step 5: When it runs the same way every time

From here on, the clicking stops.

Open Process transcript further.
Choose Complete a task automatically.
Pick a workflow set up for transcripts from the list.
Click Start workflow.

If this should happen automatically after every recording from now on, choose the trigger Transcription finished at the first step of the workflow and activate it. Under Which recordings you decide whether it applies to all team recordings in the organization or only to your own; your colleagues' private recordings never start it. Under Which meeting types you can limit it, for example to council meetings, so a construction site workflow does not receive employee reviews.

To send minutes only after you have reviewed them, use a separate process:

Set up the template Send minutes to participants.
In the created workflow, click Activate.
On your recording's page, open Approve.
In the Approve minutes dialog, under Recipients, select the members of your organization you want.
Confirm with Approve.

The person who owns the recording can approve it. The sending template starts at Minutes approved and uses the summary approved on the recording's page. Check that version before approving; it is sent as a DOCX file to the selected members.

For a new draft from the transcript, use Meeting → draft minutes. An agent writes the draft, and then a Review step waits for a human decision. Only after this review is the Word file created for download in the run.

Two things you need to know here, or you will be surprised.

A review request by email has to be set up. Without email approval, the open workflow review waits in the app until someone opens the run view. So in the review step, turn on Email approval and enter under Reviewer who should be notified.

A distribution email at the end only reaches members of your organization. External addresses are excluded, not as a default but as a fixed rule. If external guests were at the table, send the approved minutes by hand from your email program.

What stays and what goes

The transcript stays until you delete it. The audio file, on the other hand, is deleted automatically after 30 days; if you need the audio longer, download it beforehand. You can export at any time as Word, PDF, TXT, SRT, VTT or JSON.

Transcription: every button, format and permission in detail.
Workflows: building blocks, triggers and approvals.
Agents: what the individual agents do.

In the next chapter, the workflow leaves the meeting room. Invoice and paperwork automation shows how recurring processes run without anyone clicking start, with you as the gate at exactly the point where a person should decide.