Languages · Punjabi
Punjabi meeting transcription, written up for you.
Punjabi is one language with two scripts and a tone system — it is the rare Indo-Aryan language where pitch changes the word.
Punjabi is written in Gurmukhi in Indian Punjab and in the Perso-Arabic Shahmukhi script in Pakistani Punjab, which means the same spoken sentence has two entirely different written forms depending on which side of the border you are on. It is also tonal, unusually for an Indo-Aryan language: the historical voiced aspirates left behind pitch contours that distinguish otherwise identical words. That is a real acoustic feature, and it is one reason Punjabi rewards a model trained on Punjabi rather than on Hindi-adjacent data.
Dialect range is wide. Majhi around Amritsar and Lahore is the prestige variety; Malwai in the Ludhiana belt, Doabi between the rivers, and Pothwari and Saraiki-influenced speech to the west all differ audibly in vowels and everyday vocabulary. In diaspora communities the mixture is different again — Punjabi-English in Southall, Birmingham, Brampton and Surrey, where second-generation speakers switch constantly and reach for English the moment a number, a date or anything administrative comes up. The Punjabi in those meetings is often the older generation's, and the English is the paperwork's.
The meetings themselves are overwhelmingly in-person: transport and haulage businesses in Canada and the UK, agricultural and commission-agent dealings in Punjab, gurdwara management committees, and family firms. None of that involves a scheduled video call for a bot to join. GetNotes records the room on a phone, labels who said what, and produces minutes in English if that is what the paperwork needs.
Where it earns its keep
A gurdwara management committee meeting
A committee meets in Punjabi with English administrative and financial vocabulary, and the resolutions have to be minuted accurately for members and, in the UK, for charity governance. Recording the meeting gives the secretary an actual transcript to draft from.
A haulage or logistics business meeting
Owner-operators in Brampton or Birmingham discuss routes, rates and driver issues in Punjabi with English trade terms. It happens in a yard or an office, not on a call. Record it and get the decisions and follow-ups written down.
A mandi or commission-agent negotiation
Prices, weights and payment timelines are settled verbally at speed in regional Punjabi. Disputes later hinge on exactly what rate was agreed. A time-stamped transcript with speaker labels is a far stronger record than anyone's recollection.
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 produce Punjabi in Gurmukhi or Shahmukhi?
Selecting Punjabi in GetNotes produces Gurmukhi output, the script used in Indian Punjab and across most of the Sikh diaspora. Shahmukhi is not offered as a separate output script, so speakers from Pakistani Punjab get a Gurmukhi rendering of what they said. If your paperwork needs Perso-Arabic, test the free first meeting before you build a workflow on it.
Can it handle Punjabi and English mixed together?
Yes. Diaspora Punjabi in the UK and Canada switches to English constantly, particularly for numbers, dates and administrative vocabulary, and GetNotes transcribes both inside the same sentence. Claude can then write the minutes in English so they can be filed or circulated to people who do not read Gurmukhi.
Will regional dialects like Malwai or Doabi transcribe properly?
Majhi is the prestige variety, but Malwai and Doabi differ in vowels and in the pitch contours Punjabi uses in place of the old voiced aspirates, and GetNotes transcribes all three into Gurmukhi. Second-generation diaspora Punjabi, which leans harder on English, is handled as code-switching rather than treated as an error in the Punjabi.
Is this suitable for a meeting with a dozen people talking?
Yes. GetNotes attributes contributions automatically, which matters in a gurdwara or trust committee where the resolution and the person who moved it both have to appear in the record. Because Claude writes the minutes from the whole transcript, an action item names the person who accepted it even when several members are speaking around the point.
Other languages
Your next Punjabi meeting can write its own minutes.
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