Heather Minor, town clerk for Long View, North Carolina, said she used to spend four to eight hours per meeting recording, transcribing and reporting minutes for the official public record. That took time away from other tasks, including her dual role as the town’s public relations director.
Using HeyGov’s ClerkMinutes AI platform, Minor said she now spends about 30 to 60 minutes processing each meeting’s minutes, not only freeing her to handle other work, but also increasing the records’ transparency and accuracy.
“I’d record the whole meeting and then basically had to sit through the meeting twice, listening to the meeting for about 15 to 30 seconds at a time and then stopping to record what I heard,” Minor said. “This has really saved me a ton of errors.”
Even though she looked over the minutes after completing them, Minor said she didn’t always enter information correctly. “We are humans, so it’s very easy to transpose numbers or what have you,” she said. After the town, which has about 5,300 residents, held a recent budget meeting, ClerkMinutes got “every budget number correct. It picked up everything exactly how I want it to look,” Minor said.
ClerkMinutes transcribes meetings from audio files, adding timestamps and speaker names and capturing motions and votes, then saves the transcription as a Word document or PDF. Minor is able to quickly share the meeting minutes with the public, boosting the city’s transparency.
Dustin Overbeck, founder of HeyGov, said the platform — which he calls “clerkware” — can save clerks about two hours per meeting. He’s adding new features, including options to integrate municipal letterhead into the templates and upload video. When someone clicks on a timestamp on the transcription, it triggers the video so they can view, listen and read at the same time.
More than 450 municipalities use ClerkMinutes, Overbeck said. Other AI-based tools are enhancing localities’ minutes management, too.
Officials in Saratoga, California, use Hamlet, an AI tool that creates a summary of the City Council agenda, supporting documents, and audio and video recordings, according to the city’s website. Hillsborough Township, New Jersey, uses CivicPlus’s Agenda and Meeting Management Software, which allows clerks to automatically publish meeting content, according to the company.
The Illinois Municipal League issued a fact sheet on how to prepare meeting minutes using AI tools, noting solutions such as ClerkMinutes, Otter.ai, Fathom.ai and others.
