Languages · French
French meeting transcription, written up for you.
French runs its words together — liaison and elision erase the gaps a transcriber needs, which is why French audio punishes weak models more than English does.
Spoken French has no reliable acoustic word boundaries. Liaison links a silent final consonant to the next vowel, elision drops vowels before them, and enchaînement carries consonants across word edges, so a phrase arrives as one continuous stream. On top of that, French carries a great deal of meaning in endings that are barely audible — the plural of many nouns and several verb forms sound identical to the singular. Segmentation and context are doing the heavy lifting in any French transcript.
Variety matters. Québécois French differs from Metropolitan French in vowel quality, vocabulary and register to a degree that surprises people who learned French in a classroom; Belgian and Swiss French use different number words; Ivorian, Senegalese and Congolese French carry local borrowings and rhythm. Each transcribes, but none of them sounds like a Paris news bulletin.
French professional meetings also import English wholesale in technology, finance and marketing, regardless of what the Académie recommends — le brief, le deadline, un call. GetNotes transcribes those as spoken rather than translating them out, and then produces a compte rendu style output: summary, decisions taken, and action items with owners, which is the structure most French organisations already expect from their minutes.
Where it earns its keep
A comité or works council meeting
A CSE meeting has a formal agenda and a required written record. The secretary is also a participant with a view. Recording the session means the compte rendu is drafted from what was said, and the participants review and approve it before it is circulated.
A site visit or client meeting in the regions
A technical visit to a plant or a client office, conducted in French with English technical vocabulary, over machine noise and with no call to record. Put the phone down, record, and get the actions in writing before you leave the car park.
A bilingual meeting in Montréal
Québec meetings frequently run in French with English interjections and English documents on the table. GetNotes transcribes both languages in place and produces one set of minutes, rather than making someone reconstruct the bilingual conversation afterwards.
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 handle Québécois French as well as Metropolitan French?
Yes. Québécois differs from Metropolitan French in vowel quality, everyday vocabulary and register far more than classroom French suggests, and Belgian and Swiss French even use different number words — septante and nonante. GetNotes transcribes all of them, along with Ivorian, Senegalese and Congolese French, into standard French orthography with the regional wording kept as spoken.
Will accents and diacritics come out correctly?
Yes — é, è, ê, ç and the rest are produced correctly, which matters because they distinguish real words. The transcript can be pasted directly into a compte rendu or an email without a find-and-replace pass to repair missing accents.
Can it write a compte rendu automatically?
It gets you most of the way. A compte rendu is expected to be a synthesis rather than a verbatim record, and that is exactly what GetNotes returns: a summary, the decisions taken, and action items with owners and deadlines, with the speaker-labelled transcript underneath if a point is disputed. The secretary still writes the final version and the participants still approve it.
What about English words used in French business speech?
They are transcribed as spoken. French professional meetings use English technology, finance and marketing vocabulary constantly, and GetNotes handles that code-switching within a sentence rather than attempting to force everything into French. The transcript therefore matches what the room actually heard.
Other languages
Your next French meeting can write its own minutes.
Record it, and see. Your first meeting is free — thirty minutes, any language, no credit card.
Try your first meeting free