Meeting types · All-hands
All-hands minutes, without the note-taker.
The prepared part of an all-hands is already written down; the Q&A, which is the part everyone actually discusses afterwards, is not.
All-hands meetings have an odd information profile. The presented section exists in a deck and could be read in five minutes. The genuinely new content is in the questions from the floor and the leadership answers to them — often unscripted, sometimes the first public statement on something people have been speculating about for weeks. That part is written down nowhere.
Which means the company's record of its most important internal communication is a game of telephone. Someone who was in the room tells someone who was not. A half-remembered answer about hiring plans becomes a rumour with a specific number attached. By Friday the answer being repeated in the kitchen bears little resemblance to what was said on Tuesday. None of that is malicious; it is simply what happens to information that was only ever spoken.
Record it and the Q&A becomes text. GetNotes transcribes the session and writes a summary, the decisions announced and the follow-ups leadership committed to, which is often the most quietly useful part — the questions answered with 'let me come back to you on that' are exactly the ones that get forgotten unless someone lists them. Announcements with a number in them are the other case worth capturing carefully, because the figure travels far better than the caveat attached to it.
For distributed teams the written record does more work than the recording itself. Someone in a different timezone will read a two-minute summary and search the transcript for the one topic that affects them. Almost nobody rewatches an hour of video. Text is also the only version that survives being pasted into a message to the next person who missed it.
Where it earns its keep
The question about headcount
Someone asks whether there is a hiring freeze. The answer is careful and conditional. By the end of the week two versions are circulating, one of them considerably worse than what was actually said, and nobody can point at the real answer.
Half the company in another timezone
The Karachi and Manchester teams are asleep or at a client site. A recording nobody has an hour to watch is not communication. A written summary with the Q&A in it is.
The 'we'll come back to you on that' list
Three questions are parked for a proper answer later. All three are the ones people most wanted answered. Without a written list of who owes what, none of them reappears at the next all-hands and trust erodes a little.
How GetNotes works
- Record or upload. Hit record on your phone or laptop in the room — or drop in an audio file you already have. No bot joins anything.
- It writes it down. Every word transcribed, every speaker labelled, in 90+ languages including ones that switch mid-sentence.
- Share the minutes.Summary, decisions, and action items with owners — ready before everyone's back at their desk.
Questions, answered
Why record an all-hands when we already stream and record it?
Because a video recording is not a record anyone uses. GetNotes turns the session into text: a summary, the announcements, and the questions with their answers, all searchable. Someone who wants to know what was said about the pricing change finds it in seconds instead of scrubbing through fifty minutes of video hoping to recognise the moment.
Can GetNotes capture questions from the floor in a big room?
It depends on the room's audio, not on GetNotes. If questions go through a roving microphone or the room's PA, record from the audio source or place the device near a speaker and it works well. In a large hall where someone shouts a question unamplified from the back, no phone microphone will capture it cleanly — repeating the question into the mic is good practice anyway.
Should staff be told the all-hands is being recorded and written up?
Yes, say it at the start. People ask different questions when they know a written record will circulate, and that is a genuine trade-off worth being honest about rather than hiding. Some companies record the presented section and stop before an open-floor Q&A precisely to preserve candour. GetNotes only ever processes audio you deliberately record.
Our all-hands runs about an hour. Is that fine?
Comfortably. Pro handles recordings up to three hours each with a fair-use allowance of 25 hours of audio a month, so a monthly or fortnightly all-hands barely touches it. The free tier is a one-time trial of one meeting up to 30 minutes, which will cover a short all-hands but not a recurring series.
Other meeting types
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