Languages · Bengali
Bengali meeting transcription, written up for you.
Bangla spoken in Dhaka and Bangla spoken in Kolkata diverge enough in vocabulary and pronunciation that treating them as one dialect is how transcripts go wrong.
Bengali is written in the Eastern Nagari script, where consonants join into conjuncts that can be visually quite unlike their parts — ক্ষ and জ্ঞ being the classic examples — and where the inherent vowel is sometimes pronounced and sometimes not, with no marking to tell you which. A transcript that gets conjuncts and the ও/অ distinction right is readable; one that does not needs retyping. GetNotes returns Bengali in its own script with those forms intact.
The Bangladesh and West Bengal varieties genuinely differ. Dhaka Bangla and Kolkata Bangla have distinct everyday vocabulary and noticeably different vowel qualities, and Bangladeshi speech carries more Perso-Arabic borrowings while West Bengali carries more Sanskritic and Hindi ones. Chittagong and Sylheti speech departs further still. In practice a Bangladeshi NGO meeting and a Kolkata board meeting sound like two different working languages, and both need to transcribe properly.
Banglish — English inside Bengali sentences — is the norm in professional settings on both sides of the border. Dhaka's garment and development sectors run bilingual meetings almost by default: donor reporting language, compliance vocabulary and buyer specifications come out in English, everything around them in Bangla. GetNotes transcribes both and then writes minutes with decisions and action items, which is usually the artefact the donor or the buyer actually wants.
Where it earns its keep
A garment factory buyer meeting in Dhaka
A buyer's compliance visit is discussed in Bangla with English specification and audit vocabulary throughout. The follow-up email to the buyer has to be in English and precise about what was agreed. Record the meeting and start from a real record.
An NGO field debrief
Field officers report back in fast conversational Bangla, several people at once, and the programme report is due to a donor in English. A speaker-labelled transcript turns an hour of overlapping debrief into something you can actually quote from.
A Kolkata partnership or trustee meeting
A committee meets in Bengali, decisions are taken by consensus and the minute book has to record them formally. The secretary can chair or write, not both. Recording the discussion means the minutes are drafted from what was said, not from what was remembered.
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
Does GetNotes work for both Bangladeshi and Indian Bengali?
Yes. GetNotes transcribes Bangla as spoken in Dhaka and in Kolkata, including the vocabulary differences between them, and returns it in the Eastern Nagari script. There is no separate setting to choose — select Bengali when you start recording and the transcript follows the speech in front of it.
Can it transcribe a meeting that mixes Bangla and English?
Yes. Banglish is the normal register in professional meetings in Dhaka and Kolkata, and GetNotes handles switching within a sentence. English compliance, technical and commercial vocabulary comes back in Roman script inside Bengali sentences, so the transcript reads the way the meeting sounded.
Will the Bengali conjunct characters come out correctly?
GetNotes returns Bengali in its own script with conjunct forms intact, so text can be pasted into a report or a minute book without retyping. If the record has to go to a donor or a buyer in English, the written minutes are produced from the Bengali transcript, with the decisions and the named action owners carried across.
How long a Bengali meeting can I record in one go?
On the free trial you get one meeting of up to 30 minutes with no card required. On Pro, at $19 a month, recordings can run up to three hours each with unlimited meetings and a fair-use limit of 25 hours of processed audio per month, which covers a full week of field debriefs.
Other languages
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