How to write meeting minutes with AI (+ a free template)

Meeting minutes are a short, structured record of what a meeting decided — not a word-for-word transcript. Good minutes fit on one page and answer three questions: who was there, what was decided, and who owns the next step. Below is a copy-paste template you can reuse for every meeting, plus a way to let AI draft it for you from a recording, grounded in what was actually said.

The whole point of minutes is that someone who missed the meeting can read them in a minute and know what changed. That means you are curating, not transcribing. Five sections do almost all of the work, and you reuse the same five every time so the format is predictable and searchable.

Two of those sections carry the weight: decisions and action items. If you only had thirty seconds to write minutes, you would write those two. A decision nobody recorded gets relitigated next week; an action item without an owner is a wish, and one without a due date never gets scheduled.

Here is a fillable skeleton. Paste it into any doc, keep the labels, and replace the bracketed prompts. It is deliberately plain so it works for a weekly sync, a client call, or a project kickoff without redesigning it each time.

That is the entire template: five labelled slots you fill in past tense, with opinions left out. The routine around it matters as much as the template itself:

This trips people up, so it is worth being blunt about. A transcript is every word, verbatim, in speaking order. Minutes are a summary of outcomes — the decisions and the follow-ups — written for someone who was not in the room. A transcript is raw material; minutes are the finished record. You can produce minutes from a transcript, but you should never send the transcript as if it were the minutes.

Yes — AI can draft minutes in this exact shape from a recording, which is far faster than typing them live. The trick is that it should draft, not send. The best setup records the meeting without a bot, transcribes it, and then applies a reusable format so the output always lands in the same five-section skeleton you defined above.

Reline does this bot-free. The desktop app captures your microphone and the system audio locally on your machine, so no participant joins the call and nothing appears in the participant list. Being precise: capture is local, while transcription and the AI summary run in our cloud under a data-processing agreement, and your meetings are never used to train models. Transcription covers 60+ languages with automatic detection.

After the meeting you point a Lens at the recording. A Lens is a reusable output format: save one shaped like the template above (attendees, agenda, decisions, action items with owners, next steps) and every meeting you run it on comes back in that structure. The summary sits next to the full transcript and the kept recording, with a play button on every transcript line, so you can find the discussion behind a decision and hear it. That is what makes review take two minutes instead of a re-listen.

Consistency is not about discipline, it is about the format doing the work. If every meeting starts from the same five-section skeleton — whether a person fills it or a Lens drafts it — the minutes read the same way every week, and people know exactly where to look for the decision that affects them. A saved Lens makes that skeleton the default output rather than something you have to remember to apply.

• Use the same five sections every time, in the same order.
• Write decisions as settled outcomes, in past tense, with no opinions.
• Give every action item an owner and a due date — no exceptions.
• Circulate to everyone invited, not just who showed up.
• Keep the transcript as the source so any line can be verified later.