Meeting types · Site visit
Site visit minutes, without the note-taker.
A site visit is the meeting where writing anything down is physically inconvenient, which is why the report always gets written from memory two days later.
Site visits are conducted on the move. You are walking a floor, a factory line, a ward or a construction level, with a hard hat, gloves, a torch or a clipboard already occupying both hands. The person showing you round is talking continuously, pointing at things, and giving you the context that will not appear in any document. Writing while all that happens is close to impossible.
So the notes get made in the car park afterwards, or the report gets written two days later from a handful of photographs and a memory that has already merged the second floor with the third. Specific numbers — a measurement, a serial number, a date a contractor gave — are exactly what decays first and exactly what the report needs.
Record the walkthrough on a phone in a pocket or held while you walk. GetNotes transcribes it and writes structured notes, so the report becomes a matter of editing an accurate record rather than reconstructing one. Voice is also the fastest input available when your hands are full: say the observation out loud, keep walking, and it is captured. The alternative is stopping to dictate into a notes app one sentence at a time, which loses the thread of the conversation you were meant to be having.
Site audio is genuinely difficult — plant, wind, traffic, echoing halls. Get closer to the person speaking than feels necessary, shelter the microphone from wind, and if a machine is running, step away before discussing anything you need in the record. Where a reading or a serial number matters, say it aloud twice — once at the plant and once as a spoken summary before you leave the area.
Where it earns its keep
The report written from the car park
Two hours on site, forty photographs, six pages of notes that should exist and do not. The report gets written on Thursday and hedges on the details it cannot verify — which are precisely the details a client is paying for.
The contractor's verbal commitment
Standing on level three, a subcontractor says the remedial work will be done before the next pour. Nobody writes it down. It slips, and the conversation becomes two accounts of a promise made on a windy building site.
Multilingual site teams
A site manager briefs in one language and the crew discusses among themselves in another. The visiting engineer needs both in the record — including the part they could not follow at the time.
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
Will GetNotes cope with noise on an active site?
Better than a notebook, but physics still applies. GetNotes is built for real rooms on ordinary phone microphones rather than studio conditions, and it handles ambient noise reasonably. Constant plant noise or wind directly on the microphone will degrade any recording, so stand close to whoever is speaking and step away from running machinery before the parts you need on record.
Can I record hands-free while walking a site?
Yes — GetNotes runs in the mobile browser on iOS and Android with no app to install, so you can start a recording and put the phone in a chest pocket. A wired or Bluetooth headset with a microphone near your collar gives noticeably better audio on a noisy site than a phone at waist level.
Do I need to tell the site team I am recording?
Yes, and on many sites it is a condition of access rather than a courtesy. Tell the site manager at induction, note that you record walkthroughs for reporting accuracy, and check whether photography and recording restrictions apply — they often do in defence, pharmaceutical and secure facilities. GetNotes cannot know your client's site rules.
The site team speaks a different language from the report's readers. Does that matter?
GetNotes transcribes 90+ languages and handles code-switching, so a briefing given partly in one language and partly in another still produces a clean transcript. That is common on international sites where safety briefings, crew discussion and client reporting each happen in a different language.
Other meeting types
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