The meeting ends.
The page is ready.
A little production magic
Hand BW Minutes the recording, and the agenda if you have one. A forty-minute committee or a six-hour council, it makes no difference to the command. It gives you back a clickable, timecoded agenda page ready to publish, a summary of each item, the outcome of each vote with the sentence that produced it, subtitles, a YouTube chapter block, and chapter markers for Resolve, Premiere and Final Cut. Everything is computed on the machine in front of you, with nothing uploaded anywhere.
- Nothing uploaded, no account
- Perpetual license, offline for life
- Unlimited length, roughly 15 to 22 min for a 3-hour sitting
What it works on
Anything with an agenda and a chair.
The job is always the same shape: a long recording, a list of items, and somebody who has to turn one into the other before the end of the week.
City and town councils
Conseils municipaux, conseils communautaires, EPCI and departmental assemblies. The case the tool was built for, and the one with a legal deadline attached.
Boards and committees
Boards of directors, works councils, planning and licensing committees, school boards, university senates. Anywhere motions get carried and somebody minutes them.
General assemblies
Association AGMs, co-ownership meetings, shareholder meetings, union congresses. Items, debate, votes, and a document owed to the members afterwards.
Conferences and presentations
A day of talks becomes a chaptered page where each session is one click away. No votes to detect, and the rest of the pipeline works unchanged.
Public hearings and enquiries
Long, procedural, and consulted by people who need one specific passage rather than the whole recording. Deep links land on the exact item.
Any long recording, really
If it runs for hours, follows a running order and someone has to make it findable afterwards, this is the job. Meeting length and count are unlimited.
The published page
Click an item, the video goes there.
Below is an export produced by BW Minutes, untouched. It is the actual
agenda.html the software writes, loaded in a frame the way a city
website would load it. The meeting in it is French, so the page is too.
A three-minute demonstration session: invented commune, synthetic voices. We do not have a town hall's permission to publish one of their real meetings here yet, and a demo page is a poor place to help ourselves to one without asking. The mechanism is the real thing: this page came out of the same command as a three-hour session would. Open the page on its own.
The header carries a demonstration mode note because this export was produced without a license. That is what demonstration mode does: it produces everything, and marks the files as not for publication.
The page follows the idiom of a French public website: square corners, heavy headings, uppercase labels, state blue. An accent colour from your own brand guidelines replaces the default, and the page follows the visitor's light or dark preference, clearing WCAG AA in both.
The export folder, file by file
- agenda.htmlThe page above. One file, with no external dependency at all.
- summary.mdA summary of the session, and one per item.
- youtube-chapters.txtThe chapter block to paste into a YouTube description.
- subtitles.srt / .vttSubtitles for the whole session.
- chapters.vttA WebVTT chapter track for the player.
- transcript.jsonThe timecoded transcript, word by word.
- markers.edlChapter markers for DaVinci Resolve.
- markers.fcpxmlMarkers for Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro.
- chapters.json / .csvThe chapter list in the open, for a spreadsheet or another system.
Download the whole folder (ZIP, 0.9 MB) · video included, so you can open it at home.
Languages
French and English meetings.
Works in both
- Transcription of the session, French or English, on the same engine
- Subtitles and the WebVTT chapter track, in the language spoken
- Chapter detection from what the chair says: the English cue set covers the common Robert's Rules phrasing, the French one is the larger of the two
- Matching an agenda file to what actually happened in the room
- Every file that carries timecode rather than prose: chapters, markers, transcript, YouTube block
French only, today
- Vote detection. The patterns it matches are French phrasings of a result, so an English meeting gets its chapters and its subtitles without the vote outcomes
- The written summaries, which are tuned for neutral French administrative prose
- The published page's own furniture: its headings, its search field and its provenance line are French, whatever the language of the meeting
French is where the deadline, the market and the development effort are, so it is ahead. If you run English-language meetings and the three items on the right are what stand between you and using this, say so in the early access form: they are work we would rather do for a named customer than on a guess.
Why now
In France, this comes back every month.
For a French commune this is required, with a deadline written into statute. Elsewhere, and for boards and assemblies, the same work is usually owed to members by the organisation's own rules.
The list of deliberations
Since 1 July 2022, the old compte rendu was replaced by an obligation to publish the list of adopted deliberations, with their subject and date, within the week following the session.
Ordonnance n° 2021-1310 of 7 October 2021, and decree n° 2021-1311
The minutes, online
Once approved by the assembly, the procès-verbal must be published electronically on the commune's website within a week of its approval, and stay freely accessible there.
A timecoded list of deliberations, published as a page, satisfies the legal obligation and gives a resident something worth opening, out of the same hour of work rather than two.
How it works
Four steps.
One evening.
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1
Hand over the recording
One command, the video or audio file, and the agenda in PDF, DOCX or plain text if you have one. Item numbers are read out of it and attached to the matching points.
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2
Let it run
Transcription, segmentation into items, summaries and vote detection run one after another on your machine. A three-hour session takes about a quarter of an hour.
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3
Read it back and fix it
A local page opens beside the video: correct a title inline, snap a boundary to the frame on screen, delete an item that should not be there. One button rewrites every file from the corrected chapters.
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4
Publish
Upload the file if your CMS accepts HTML. Paste an iframe if it does not. Or have us publish the page and paste the one line it gives you. The chapter block goes into the YouTube description, and the markers open in the edit.
On your machine
Nothing leaves. Nothing to sign.
What “local” means here
Transcription, segmentation and summaries all execute on the computer that processes the meeting. There is no account to create, no file to upload, no hosting provider to vet and no data processing agreement to have signed, because there is no processor.
An --offline flag makes any network access impossible, including
by accident. Summaries work with no model at all, or with one installed on your
own hardware through Ollama. Remote engines exist, they are an explicit choice,
and --offline refuses them.
White label by default
The published page carries the organisation's identity and none of ours: no logo, no product name, no link back, not even a generator tag. A credit line exists and is added on request.
Your own colours
Two looks, modern and institutional, and an accent colour from your brand guidelines. Both clear WCAG AA in light and dark.
A single file
The page pulls no font, no script and no tracker from anywhere, so it sits on any hosting. It stays yours: take the file elsewhere years later and it still works, because there is nothing to reconnect it to.
What we measure
The numbers we are willing to print.
Measured
- On Apple Silicon, with Whisper large-v3: 0.08× to 0.12× realtime
- Which puts a three-hour sitting at fifteen to twenty-two minutes, depending on the recording
- Both ends of that range are full end-to-end runs on real recordings: a 3 h 32 municipal council and a 3 h 00 parliamentary sitting. A short benchmark clip runs at 0.077×, and we stopped quoting that on its own, because the number a buyer plans an evening around should come from a real evening
- On the parliamentary sitting, both agenda items were located and the boundary between them landed 3.5 seconds from the one the institution publishes itself
- On the municipal council, 17 of 19 chapters were named and a vote outcome was detected on 13 of them
- Vote outcomes come from rules, never from a language model
- Each one keeps the exact sentence that produced it, with its timecode
Not yet measured
- We publish no accuracy percentage. The evaluation command is built and the target is written into the spec, but it has only run against a short synthetic sample so far
- One boundary matching on one sitting is an encouraging data point and not a measurement. A published percentage needs a hand-made reference across several real recordings, and that has not run yet
- On that same three-hour sitting it also cut the debate into blocks it could not name, and flagged every one of them. That is the designed behaviour, and it is also work left for the operator
- Vote outcomes are detected, which is why each one is auditable in one click instead of simply asserted
- Automatic segmentation gets boundaries close. The review page exists for the ones it does not
One example, in the export above
The agenda of the demonstration session has four items. The fourth, Questions diverses, was never found in the transcript, and the software said so: item absent from the transcript: postponed, withdrawn, or off-mic? It did not invent a timecode to round the list out. That is the general rule: a doubtful passage is flagged for a human to look at rather than filled in.
For the editor
The chapters arrive in the timeline.
The chapter list is useful past the website. BW Minutes also writes edit markers: an EDL for DaVinci Resolve, an FCPXML for Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro. The locator colour encodes how confident the segmentation was, so the items worth a second look are visible on the timeline before anyone goes hunting for them.
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Already shooting the meeting with BW Logger? Give BW Minutes the session file. The markers your operator dropped live become anchor points for the segmentation, instead of everything being rediscovered from the audio.
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EDL and FCPXML, the same interchange files as BW Logger. For the same reason: they open everywhere, and they will outlive us.
TITLE: Conseil municipal du 24 juin 2026
FCM: NON-DROP FRAME
001 BWMIN V C 00:00:00:00 00:00:00:01
* LOC: 00:00:00:00 GREEN Ouverture de la seance
002 BWMIN V C 00:00:28:00 00:00:28:01
* LOC: 00:00:28:00 GREEN Approbation du proces-verbal
003 BWMIN V C 00:01:00:01 00:01:00:02
* LOC: 00:01:00:01 GREEN Budget de renovation de l'ecole
004 BWMIN V C 00:02:05:04 00:02:06:00
* LOC: 00:02:05:04 GREEN Convention avec le syndicat des eauxmarkers.edl, taken from the export above. Green means the segmentation was sure of itself.
Pricing
Whose meetings are they?
That one question decides which of the two price lists applies to you. All prices exclude VAT.
You publish your own meetings
A commune processing its own council, an EPCI, a department, a company or an association publishing its own assembly. Pay once, activate online once, then the machine runs offline indefinitely: no expiry, no periodic check, nothing that could strand a session. It is the BW Logger contract, word for word.
- Unlimited meetings, unlimited length
- Every export format
- Review page included
- Offline for life after activation
- Move it to another machine
- Everything in Single station
- 5 activations on one key
- Reassign seats yourself
- Invoicing and purchase orders
- Maintenance and upgrades, optional: new versions, new speech models, format changes. The version you bought keeps working whether or not you renew. 99€ / year
- We run it for you: send us the recording, we send back the export folder, and we publish the page for you if your CMS will not take an HTML file. For anyone who wants the result without running the tool. 89€ / meeting
You publish other people's meetings
A production company or an audiovisual provider filming councils for several clients and selling chaptering and minutes on top. Your usage grows with every client you sign, so the price follows the meetings you process. The allowance is annual: twenty-five sessions in March and none in August is the same year. Pay annually and you get twelve months for ten.
- 5.80€ a meeting
- White label, your identity or the client's
- Length and file count unlimited
- Enough for around fifteen clients
- White label, your identity or the client's
- Monthly or annual invoicing
- 2.48€ a meeting
- For a regional filming network
- Priority support
- Over the allowance on Studio or Agence. Set above the tier rate on purpose, so the next tier up becomes the cheaper answer before we have to sell it to you. 5€ / meeting
- Over the allowance on Réseau. There is no tier above it, so going over costs less per meeting than the tier itself: growing past the top of the list never makes a meeting more expensive. 2.40€ / meeting
- Nothing ever blocks. Going over the allowance bills the overage; it does not refuse or delay a session at 23:00 after a four-hour council. 0 blocks
- What gets counted, and nothing else: the number of meetings exported, as an integer. No titles, no audio, no transcript, no client names. You can read it before we do. 1 integer
Add BW Logger at half price
Whichever line above you take, BW Logger comes with it for 45€ a station instead of 90€, or 180€ for five instead of 360€, still one-time and still offline for life. It logs the live multicam while the meeting runs, and BW Minutes reads that session file so the markers your operator dropped become anchor points for the chaptering instead of everything being rediscovered from the audio. See BW Logger.
Mention it when you ask for early access and it is applied to your order.
License scope. The perpetual license covers the meetings of your own assembly or body. Processing meetings on behalf of third parties is what the subscription covers. That is the whole difference between the two lists, and it is written into the terms rather than discovered later.
| Option | What it is | Per meeting |
|---|---|---|
| VerbIAtim | Cloud transcription and a draft PV, delivered in 24 h | 117 to 177€ |
| Human transcription | A person transcribes the session | ≈ 470€ |
| In house | 2 to 4 h of an officer scrubbing the video | 60 to 120€ |
| BW Minutes, subscription | The provider processes the meeting themselves | 2.40 to 5.80€ |
| BW Minutes, license | The organisation processes its own meetings | 490€ once |
A commune holds six to twelve sessions a year, so the recurring bill from the closest competitor runs to roughly 1,170 to 1,770€ a year, indefinitely. Said plainly: that competitor sells a service with a human reviewing it, and BW Minutes sells a tool you run yourself. If the service is what you want, the “we run it for you” line above is there for exactly that.
Before you buy
Try it on your own meeting.
There is no trial that closes after thirty days. Without a license BW Minutes runs in demonstration mode: it processes a whole session, yours, and produces every file. You judge the quality on your own recording rather than on ours.
What demonstration mode withholds is the right to publish, marked on the files themselves rather than enforced by crippling the result. You see exactly what you are buying before you buy it.
Early access
Not on sale yet. Soon.
BW Minutes is finished and it works, but two things are missing before we can sell it: our activation server does not issue licenses for this module yet, and there is no signed macOS installer. Today it installs as a Python package, which suits a production company and certainly not a town hall's IT department.
We would rather say that than take a payment we cannot honour. Write to us: we will tell you when it opens, and the first organisations who trust us with a real session are the ones who let us measure accuracy properly.
Tell us who you are, a public body or a provider, how many meetings you handle a year, and what language they run in. Your address is used to reply and for nothing else: see the privacy policy.
FAQ
What people ask
Do we have to supply the agenda?
No, though it helps. Without one, segmentation works from what is said in the room and the titles are the ones the chair announces. With one, items are attached to their reference number and carry their official wording. PDF, DOCX or plain text, it does not matter which.
Our meetings contain names and addresses. Where do they go?
Nowhere. Everything is computed on the machine that processes the session: no upload, no account, no third-party service, so there is no processor to vet and no data processing agreement to sign. The offline flag makes network access impossible outright. If you explicitly pick a remote summary engine, that does send the transcript to a third party, and it is refused the moment offline mode is requested.
Does this replace the official minutes?
No, and the published page says so itself: only the minutes approved by the assembly are authoritative. BW Minutes produces the timecoded chapter list, the summaries and the list of deliberations with their vote outcome. That saves most of the drafting time and makes the video navigable, and it is not a document that binds the organisation.
How reliable are the vote outcomes?
They come from rules rather than a language model, and every result keeps the exact sentence that produced it with its timecode. A clerk clicks and hears what produced “adopted unanimously”. Being checkable in one click is what makes them usable, and it is a stronger position than a claim of infallibility we could not stand behind. Counts are read when they are spoken, for example “15 for, 2 against, 2 abstentions”. Vote detection is French only today, see Languages above.
Does the published page carry your name?
No. By default it carries no logo, no product name, no link back to us, not even a generator meta tag. The one fixed line is the provenance statement, which a machine-written document owes its readers. If you are happy to credit us, an option adds it beside that line.
Can we put it inside our existing website?
Yes, by one of three routes, because content management systems vary wildly in what they will accept. If yours allows an HTML upload, the file goes straight in. If it refuses one, which is common, embed it in an iframe: it reports its own height to the host page, so it sizes itself. And if you would rather not touch either, we publish the page and give you a single line to paste, on your own domain if you want one. Deep links work in every case, so a news article can point straight at the seventh item of the meeting of 24 June. The file stays yours whichever route you take: move it somewhere else later and it keeps working.
What machine does this need?
The speed figure above is from an Apple Silicon Mac, which is the fast path. A machine without that acceleration works too, more slowly. A signed macOS installer is one of the things missing before sale; until then installation goes through a Python package.
What if a provider already films our meetings?
Then they are probably the ones to equip, and the subscription exists for that. Tell them it exists, or put us in touch. If they already shoot with BW Logger, the markers they place live become anchor points for the segmentation.
A little production magic
Wednesday's meeting, online Thursday morning.
Ask for early accessPerpetual license for your own meetings. Subscription for other people's.