Someone asks for everything said about a project at the March meeting. Without a transcript, that’s a staff member scrubbing through six hours of video with a notepad, and a response that takes days.
With a transcript, it's a search. Find the term, pull the pages, send the response. The same search works across every meeting you have ever had transcribed.
You've got twenty people at the podium with only some of them giving their names. Some say a name the clerk has never seen spelled out. Someone reads a street address into the record. Someone speaks in Spanish. Someone speaks over the chair. You get the picture. We do not guess.
Same-day meeting transcripts, 24-hour turnaround, expedited delivery ahead of a packet deadline, or a standing schedule you can plan the year around
Send us the recording through our secure transfer site, along with the agenda and any prep material you have.
Our transcription technology creates the first draft, then trained transcribers correct and format it.
It is formatted to your standard, with time-coding if you need it.
Our team runs a final quality check.
You receive the final verbatim record, certified if you need it, and we delete the source files on a documented timeline.
One meeting, delivered the way each part of your organization needs it. Deliverables can include.
Live captioning of board and council meetings is where Aberdeen started, and it remains a natural companion to meeting transcription. Real-time captions through your encoder make the meeting accessible to residents watching at home while it is happening.
Captioning and transcription from one vendor means one point of contact, one invoice, and one team that already knows your members, your regulars at the podium, and how your project names are spelled.
What a vendor or procurement review usually asks for, answered up front.
Handled by US-based team members and stored in US data centers located in Virginia. Files come to us through a secure transfer site rather than email, access is limited to the people doing the work, and files are deleted on a documented schedule once the transcript is delivered and accepted. We will provide written certification of destruction if your records policy requires it, and we do not use your content to train AI. See our Trust Center for the full documentation.
We do not require a multi-year commitment to work with us. Send us a group of hearings or set up a standing schedule if that suits you better. If a solicitation or your procurement process requires a term contract we will of course sign one, but we will not ask you for a long-term commitment as a condition of working together.
Aberdeen Captioning, Inc., doing business as Aberdeen Broadcast Services, is a California-certified Small Business (certification #2001516). Where a solicitation carries a DVBE participation requirement, we can meet it through a California-certified Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise subcontractor. We carry general liability, automobile, workers' compensation, and errors and omissions coverage, and we can supply certificates with your bid package.
Minutes summarize what a body decided. A transcript records what everyone said, word for word, with speakers identified and lines numbered. Minutes tell you the motion carried four to one. A transcript tells you what the fourth member said before she voted, and what the eleven residents said before that.
Not always, and we will tell you when you do not. Agencies come to us when the record needs to be searchable, when a decision is likely to be appealed, when records requests keep landing on the same meeting, or when the clerk's office is spending hours writing up what a transcript would have produced overnight. If none of that applies to you, minutes may be all you need.
It turns hours of scrubbing through video into a search. Staff can find every mention of a project, a parcel, or a person across every transcribed meeting, pull the relevant pages, and respond in a fraction of the time. It also means two people searching the same record get the same answer.
Yes. Send us what you have and we will work through the backlog on a schedule and a budget that fits your fiscal year. A practical place to start is with the meetings that generate the most records requests and work outward from there.
Yes. Public comment in a language other than English can be transcribed in the original, translated into English, or both, depending on what your record requires. If your meeting uses an interpreter, we can work from the interpreted audio, the original, or both. Tell us which languages come up at your meetings and we will scope it.
We label them by a consistent convention, typically SPEAKER or the name the chair announces, and we flag anything ambiguous rather than guessing. If your clerk has a preferred convention, we use yours. We would rather hand you something marked unclear than something confidently wrong.
Yes. We build to your template: your seal or logo in the header, your line numbering, your speaker label convention, your page setup. If you are switching from another vendor, send us a transcript you already like and we will match it so your archive stays consistent.
Yes. We deliver time-coded plain text built to drop into agenda and video management platforms so viewers can jump to the moment an item was discussed. Tell us which system you use and we will format for it.
Usually, and often much sooner. Same-day, 24-hour, and expedited turnaround are all things clients ask us for and things we take on. What we can commit to depends on the length of the meeting, the number of speakers, and the format you need. Send us your meeting calendar and we will tell you what we can commit to, in writing, so you can plan your packets around it.
Routinely. We keep a meeting with a single writer wherever we can, since that is the cleanest way to keep speaker labels and formatting consistent. On a very long session that is not always practical, and if more than one person is involved you would not be able to tell from the transcript: you receive one document with consistent labels and continuous pagination, not a pile of files for your clerk to reconcile.
We tell you where, and we do not invent words to fill the gap. Inaudible passages are marked, and we send a note identifying exactly which portions were affected so your clerk can decide how to handle them.
Yes. If you need a certified transcript, it includes a signed certificate of accuracy from the transcriber. If you do not need certification, we can provide the final verbatim transcript without it.
When your policy, contract, or solicitation specifically requires certification by a Certified Shorthand Reporter or Certified Electronic Transcriber, we can provide CSR or CET certification as well. Tell us what your requirements call for and we will confirm in writing what we can provide before you commit.
Yes. We can deliver a text-searchable PDF or Word document for your public website or archive.
If your agency has specific document-accessibility requirements, tell us what standard or format you need and we will confirm what we can provide before the project begins.
That is your call, not ours. Our standard workflow uses our transcription technology to create the first draft. Trained transcribers then correct and format it, with a final review before delivery.
If your policy or contract requires that no AI touches the file, we run a fully human workflow instead. Tell us at quote time and we will scope it that way from the start. We also disclose our use of AI in writing before any contract is signed.
You tell us and we fix it, at no charge. Call during business hours and a human picks up. Start a chat on our site and you will get an immediate acknowledgement, then a real answer written by a person.
Your clerk will have a named point of contact who knows your meetings, so if something turns up the day before a packet goes out, you are talking to someone who can fix it rather than filing a ticket and waiting.
We do. Live captioning of board and council meetings through a caption encoder is one of Aberdeen's core services, and it pairs naturally with meeting transcription.
Meeting transcripts are priced by the recorded minute or by the page, depending on which fits your program better, with turnaround and formatting factored in. Recurring meeting schedules get a standing rate, and archive backlogs are quoted as a project.
Send us a sample of what you need plus your meeting calendar and we will send you a price quote you can take into a budget cycle.
Give us a recording and the transcript format you use today. We will transcribe it, match your template, and price out your meeting calendar for the year.
