Meeting types · Workshop
Workshop minutes, without the note-taker.
The whiteboard survives a workshop; the reasoning that produced it does not, and the reasoning is what you need in six weeks.
Workshops generate a great deal of visible output and almost no durable record. At the end of the day there are photographs of walls covered in stickies, a prioritised list, and eight people with a shared understanding that will have decayed noticeably by the following week. What is missing is why: which options were considered and rejected, on what grounds, and what the group assumed when it chose.
The facilitator cannot fill that gap. They are managing timeboxes, drawing people out, cutting off the tangent that is eating the afternoon. Rotating a scribe among participants means someone is always half-out of the exercise. And the tidy artefact produced afterwards inevitably describes conclusions rather than arguments. By the time it is typed up, a live disagreement has been smoothed into a recommendation nobody can interrogate.
Recording the sessions gives you the reasoning. GetNotes transcribes each block with speaker labels and writes up the decisions and the actions with owners, so when someone asks in six weeks why the second option was dropped, the answer exists. That question is the single most common reason workshop outcomes get relitigated. It also stops the facilitator being the only person carrying the trade-off the group accepted.
Practically, record in blocks rather than as one continuous file: one recording per exercise or per session between breaks. It matches how the day is structured, keeps each write-up tied to the exercise it belongs to, and fits comfortably inside the three-hour per-recording limit on Pro. It also means someone who joined after lunch can read the afternoon's write-up without wading through the morning to find it.
Where it earns its keep
Photographs of a wall, three weeks later
Someone opens the photos of the prioritisation wall. The order is clear and the reason for it is completely gone. Two people remember the trade-off differently, and the workshop's main decision is quietly reopened.
Breakouts that reported back in four minutes
Three groups spend forty minutes each and report back in four. The reporting-back is a compression that loses the interesting detail. Recording each breakout keeps the substance of what the group actually worked through.
Writing the deliverable afterwards
A consultant has to turn a two-day client workshop into a written recommendation. Reconstructing eight sessions from photographs and memory takes days. Working from transcripts and per-session summaries turns it into editing rather than archaeology.
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
How should I record a full-day workshop?
In blocks that match the agenda rather than as one long file — one recording per exercise or per session between breaks. Pro allows up to three hours per recording and a fair-use 25 hours of audio a month, so a full day fits, and separate recordings mean each write-up is tied to the exercise it came from instead of buried in a seven-hour transcript.
What about breakout groups in different corners of the room?
One device cannot usefully record four simultaneous conversations. If you need breakout detail, have one person per group record on their own phone and upload the file afterwards — GetNotes accepts MP3, M4A, WAV, WebM and MP4 uploads, so any phone voice recorder works. Otherwise record the plenary and the report-backs only.
Does GetNotes capture what was written on the whiteboard?
No — it works from audio, so it captures what people said, not what they drew. In practice those are complementary: photograph the wall for the artefact and let GetNotes hold the discussion that produced it. The reasoning behind a decision is almost always spoken aloud even when only the conclusion gets written up.
Can I share workshop notes with the client the same day?
Yes. GetNotes produces share-ready minutes — summary, decisions, action items with owners — per recording, so you can send a client a substantive write-up the same afternoon rather than a week later. Sending the day's decisions while everyone still remembers the room is also the best moment to catch a misunderstanding.
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