How to Transcribe Hinglish Meetings into Clean Notes
· meetings, Hinglish, notes, workplace
Most Indian workplace meetings are conducted in Hinglish — English nouns and jargon inside Hindi sentence structure, with the ratio shifting by speaker. Tools tuned for pure English or pure Hindi handle this badly. Capturing it well needs a slightly different approach.
Choose the dominant language, not the average
Select the language that carries the sentence structure, not the one with more words. If people are saying "toh humein deployment kal tak karna hai", the structure is Hindi even though the technical terms are English — select Hindi. Technical vocabulary is preserved in English automatically.
Get the audio right
- Place the phone at the centre of the table, not in front of one person
- On video calls, dictate from the same device that plays the call audio, or use a headset with an inline mic
- Ask people not to talk over each other for the first sentence of a new topic — that sentence carries the context the model needs
Record the meeting in segments
Start a new recording per agenda item. Segmented transcripts are far easier to convert into notes than one forty-minute block, and one noisy patch does not degrade everything.
Turn the transcript into notes
After the meeting, run cleanup to remove fillers, then format as Notes. You get headed bullet points instead of a wall of dialogue. Then edit for three things:
- Decisions — what was actually agreed
- Owners — who is doing it
- Dates — by when
Anything that is not one of those three rarely needs to be in the notes.
Add names to Saved Words
Colleague names, client names, product names and internal acronyms are the most frequently mangled words in a meeting transcript. Adding them once fixes them in every future session.
Sharing the notes
Send notes in the language the team reads, which is often not the language the meeting was held in. Dictate the summary again in English if the written culture is English — speaking a summary from memory takes ninety seconds and produces better notes than translating the transcript line by line.
Consent
Tell participants you are transcribing. It is basic courtesy, it is expected in most workplaces, and people speak more clearly when they know a transcript exists.