Minutes with artificial intelligence
The minutes do not come out of a single prompt to a language model. They pass through four stages, each with a narrow task, and every paragraph still traces back to the audio, the documents and the votes the platform recorded.
What the platform writes, and from what
A transcription tool listens to audio and returns text. Here, the session was already on record before the drafting began.
When drafting starts, the platform already knows the order of business, which documents were attached to each item, who was present and at what time they arrived or left, how long each member held the floor and how each item was voted. Transcription with speaker identification is only one of the sources. Notes handwritten during the session come in through the same route: they are photographed, read by optical character recognition and become part of the material available to the minutes.
That is why the vote count on a resolution does not come from what was made out in the audio. It comes from the voting record.
MinutesOrdinary session
Official structure · body register
7 sourcesHow it works
The complete journey of a set of minutes, from the point of view of whoever produces them. Formal approval still takes place at the following session, in accordance with the entity standing orders.
See this flow in a real sessionAudio is captured during the session, connected to the microphones the room already has or through simple equipment provided. Notes handwritten by secretaries, councillors or board members are collected at the end.
Works with existing equipmentThe session is transcribed and each participant is identified by cross-referencing the audio with the recorded attendance. In parallel, optical character recognition (OCR) reads the handwritten notes and turns them into editable text, assigned to the right item.
Transcription and OCR in a single stepAgenda documents, attendance, contributions, roll-call votes and resolutions already in the platform are linked automatically to the right item of the minutes, together with the digitised notes.
Nothing is typed twiceAsking a language model to "write the minutes of this meeting" produces a plausible text with no guarantees. Here drafting is split into stages because each answers for a single thing, and the next works on the verifiable output of the one before.
Before a single line is written, the material is assessed: which parts of the audio are intelligible, which documents exist per item, where there are recording gaps or overlapping passages. A session with poor audio is flagged here, at the start, not discovered by the reviewer at the end.
The transcription is walked through in segments and what comes out are facts with an identified origin: who spoke, on which item, with what proposal and which vote they declared. No prose is written at this stage. Separating collection from drafting is what stops the final text filling gaps with assumptions.
Only now are the minutes written, in the official structure by period and item, in the writing register chosen by the body and with the entity own vocabulary. The text is built on the extracted facts, not on the raw transcription.
A final pass checks the text against the standing orders and the platform records: item numbering, resolution wording, voting results, names and roles. This is the stage that catches any difference between what was written and what was recorded.
The chain does not rest on a single engine. If the main one becomes unavailable, work moves automatically to another, and transcription follows the same principle. A session is never left undrafted because an external service went down, and the entity does not need to know which one it was.
The person answerable for the minutes opens the current version and edits the text. Every save creates a new numbered version, identifying who made the change and why, for example correcting names or validating the vote on an item. Nothing is replaced silently and earlier versions remain available. Alternatively, the AI can be asked to improve the current version rather than generate it afresh.
No version is overwrittenThe minutes are signed electronically by the officer answerable for them and by the chair of the body, then sent to the members for review. Formal approval takes place at the following session. Once approved, they are published on the transparency portal with one click, searchable and exportable as PDF, with the validation manifest that lets anyone confirm the text has not been altered.
Ready for member reviewWriting register
Not all standing orders require the same thing. Some bodies record the substance of what was said; others must transcribe certain contributions word for word, such as vote statements. The register is set per body and applies to every set of minutes for that body.
Oratio obliqua
Reported speech. The minutes recount what was said, in the third person and in the tense of the report. It is the traditional register of Portuguese public administration and the most compact to read.
Councillor Ana Costa expressed agreement with the proposal, stressing that the activity plan increases investment in the municipal school network for the first time in four years.
Oratio obliqua + ipsis verbis
Reported speech, with literal transcription where required or requested: vote statements, proposals read out in session, passages a member asks to have recorded in their own words.
Councillor Ana Costa expressed agreement with the proposal and submitted the following vote statement, asking for it to be recorded in the minutes: "I vote in favour because this plan increases investment in the municipal school network for the first time in four years."
Ipsis verbis
A faithful transcription of what was said, in the very same words, from beginning to end. Required by some standing orders and common in bodies where the exact wording of a contribution is open to challenge.
Councillor Ana Costa: "Thank you, Mr Chair. I am voting in favour, and I would like it on record why: this plan increases investment in the municipal school network for the first time in four years."
Beyond the register, each body has its own record with the terms and acronyms it uses, style notes and rules the minutes must observe. The record is written by the entity and used as a reference while drafting, and it is what separates generic minutes from minutes that read like the ones that body has already approved. None of this trains any model.
Why it matters
Until the minutes are out, the resolution exists but cannot be consulted. A drafting delay, which looks like a matter of internal organisation, ends up deciding when citizens learn what was decided on their behalf.
Approval can only happen at the following meeting. If the drafting is not ready in time, the text skips to the meeting after that, and the delay stops being measured in days and starts being measured in session cycles.
A vote recorded the wrong way round, or a contribution attributed to someone who did not make it, is not a formatting error. It is grounds for challenge, and the minutes are the documentary evidence relied upon when the decision is contested.
Correction requests circulate as attachments, each with a different file name. After three rounds, nobody can say for sure which version is in force or who introduced each change.
The house style, the established formulas and the criteria for detail usually live in the head of whoever has always written the minutes. When that person is away or changes role, there is nowhere to find them.
The difference is not how fast someone types. It is who does the groundwork.
Traditional model
tasks before the first read
days or weeks
With Plenários.pt
the one that should not be automated
under 24 hours
Someone listens to the recording from start to finish and writes down what they heard, which takes longer than the session itself
The minutes are drafted from the data already recorded during the session
The result of each vote is copied from notes taken in parallel
Votes come in already tallied, under the item they belong to
Attendance is checked against a sheet signed on the way in
Attendance and quorum come from the record made in the session itself
The documents for each item are attached by hand, minutes after minutes
Documents have been linked to the item since the notice of meeting
Paper notes stay on loose sheets, outside any search and away from the item they refer to
Paper notes come in through OCR and become searchable
Knowing who spoke depends on the memory of whoever was writing
When the identification of a speaker is not conclusive, the minutes say so instead of risking a name
Review only begins once this whole chain is finished
Your partWhat is left for the person in charge is to check and approve
What disappears is the transcription and the compilation. What remains is the judgement of the person answerable for the minutes, which is precisely the part that should not be handed to a machine.
What sets this drafting apart
Transcribing audio is the solved part of the problem. The hard part is what comes next: writing in the right register, with the right designations, without asserting anything that is not on record.
A member vote only enters the minutes if it is in the voting record or was unambiguously declared. In case of doubt, the minutes record the tallied result and do not attribute individual votes. And when it is not possible to confirm who spoke, the minutes say exactly that, instead of risking a name.
Vocabulary, formulas and constructions typical of the minutes of councils, assemblies and parish boards. No machine translations, no imported expressions.
What comes out is a set of minutes ready to sign, not a draft to rewrite. Human review exists to check and correct, not to draft again.
The session transcription, with each participant identified, is kept alongside the minutes. A disagreement over a contribution is settled against the record.
A useful drafting rule defined in one body becomes a suggestion for the others. Adopting it is one click, so is ignoring it. The rule travels, never the session content.
Public verification
Every printed set of minutes carries a validation manifest at the end: its own identifier, the SHA-256 digest of the content and the address where that digest is confirmed. Anyone holding the document, on paper or as a PDF, can confirm in a browser that the text is the one that was generated and has not been altered since. No account, no request, no going through us.
When the digest does not match, the page says exactly that and nothing else. It does not return the entity, the body, the date of the meeting or the correct digest: a verification page that helps whoever got it wrong stops verifying anything at all.
Footer of the last page of the minutes
The identifier states the version. Minutes revised after approval stop matching the manifest that was distributed, and that is the point.
Security and data protection
Recordings, transcriptions and minutes belong to the entity, and the complete archive leaves as a single file whenever it wants, without asking permission and without paying to leave. The models are not trained on the entity material. Access is filtered by profile and by body on every database query, not on screen, which is the difference between hiding something and not returning it.
Security and compliance in detailDesigned for real work
The difference is not in the software, it is in the standing orders. Each type of body has its own periods, majorities, vocabulary and way of addressing whoever has the floor. The platform reads those rules from the body configuration instead of assuming them.
Public and private meetings, binding resolutions, proposals, roll-call votes and executive attendance management.
Long contributions, a pre-agenda period, votes by bench and citizen participation.
A lighter operation, focused on speed and on publication accessible to residents.
Quarterly sessions, review of the parish board activity, motions and votes with the whole assembly present.
General assemblies, elections of governing bodies, one-member-one-vote ballots and minutes for regulators.
Youth, education, safety, culture and other advisory boards with regular minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Direct answers for municipal secretariats, lawyers, assembly secretaries and association boards. If any doubt remains, it is quicker to talk.
See all questionsA transcription gives back what was said, in order, word for word. Minutes are something else: an official document organised by the order of business, written in the register the body's rules of procedure require, with the resolutions and the counted votes sitting beside the item they belong to. Plenários.pt handles the drafting in four chained stages. First it audits the available sources - transcription, documents attached to each item, attendance, votes, paper notes digitised by OCR - and plans the structure of the document. Then it extracts the facts, without interpreting them. Only then does it write the minutes. And a final stage reviews the text against the entity's rules of procedure and against the data recorded during the session, to catch discrepancies before the draft reaches whoever has to sign it. Each body also chooses the drafting register it uses: reported speech, hybrid, or verbatim in full.
The session audio is captured and transcribed automatically, with the speech separated by speaker. In parallel, notes handwritten on paper during the session are digitised by OCR (optical character recognition) and assigned to the correct item on the order of business. Documents, attendance and votes already recorded on the platform enter without being copied by hand. The drafting then runs in four stages: an audit of the sources and a plan for the document, extraction of the facts, the official drafting itself, and a review against the entity's rules of procedure. The result is a draft organised by item and written in the register defined for that body. The human lead then reviews it. The minutes are signed by the officer responsible for them and by the chair of the body, and sent for review by councillors, deputies or members of the competent body. Total time from the session to dispatch for review: under 24 hours. Formal approval takes place at the following session.
The artificial intelligence produces an initial draft. The final version is always reviewed, validated and approved by the human leads of the entity according to the usual legal circuit of discussion and approval. The platform eliminates the mechanical work of transcription and structuring, but keeps full human control over the final version. The legal value is the same as that of any formally approved minutes.
Minutes that traditionally take weeks, in extreme cases months, are ready to send to members in under 24 hours. The draft generated by the AI is available shortly after the session ends, with no manual step in between. The human review, usually focused on fine adjustments, is completed in a few hours. The minutes are then signed by the responsible officer and by the chair of the body, and forwarded for review. Formal approval takes place at the following session, as the rules of procedure require. The gain is not only on the clock. What disappears is the manual transcription, the copying of voting results and the checking of attendance, all of which now come from data already recorded during the session.
Interventions are assigned by cross-checking three sources: the attendance recorded for the session, the separation of speakers in the captured audio, and the list of members configured for the body. What matters most, though, is what happens when the cross-check is not conclusive. The platform does not invent a name. The minutes state, in that very paragraph, that the speaker's name does not appear in the available transcription and that confirming it depends on the original recording. Whoever reviews the text sees exactly where the doubt lies, instead of having to trust a plausible-looking attribution.
Yes. Plenários.pt includes OCR (optical character recognition) to digitise notes handwritten on paper or in notebooks during the session. The notes are converted into editable text and assigned to the correct item on the order of business, becoming integrated into the draft minutes generated by the AI. It solves a classic problem of Portuguese formal sessions, where handwritten paper notes are common and until now required slow manual transcription.
Yes. Each generation is kept as a numbered version of the minutes for that session, with the history in plain sight, so it is always possible to go back and compare. The draft for immediate circulation is a separate document, with the essentials of the resolutions, produced from the same content. And when the body approves the minutes, the approved text becomes a public document of the session: that is how the portal shows it to the citizen, with no second, softened version written for outside consumption. The contract states how many generations are included per session, and the panel shows the count as it goes, so a further generation is never a surprise on the invoice.
Yes. Earlier minutes can be loaded into the document management, where OCR makes them searchable by content alongside the new ones, forming a single digital archive. The drafting style of the entity is not obtained by training on those files. It is stated explicitly, on a screen of its own for each body, where the services set out the house terminology, the forms of address and the drafting register to use. It is a written, revocable decision, not a learned behaviour, which means it can be read, discussed and changed by whoever is responsible for the minutes.
Glossary
The terms used on this page and in the daily work of those who prepare sessions, with the meaning they carry in Portugal.
See it with your own minutes
It is the honest way to assess this: the text the platform would produce side by side with the text the entity produced, with your body standing orders and writing register already configured. Twenty-five minutes.
Privacy
What this site stores in your browser, and why. Your decision is stored in this browser and you can come back to this panel at any time from the site footer.
They protect the demo request form against forged submissions and store the choice you make in this panel. Without them the form cannot be sent.
__Host-plenarios_sessionform pages only, until you close the browserplenarios_consentthis choice, for 180 daysThey do not track your browsing and are not shared with anyone.
This site uses no advertising, audience measurement or tracking cookies. Details in the Cookie policy and the Privacy policy.