How to use Claude with your meeting transcripts

A transcript is raw material. The useful part is what you do with it afterwards: a summary for people who missed the meeting, a list of decisions and action items, a follow-up email, or an answer to “what did we agree about the launch date?” three weeks later. Claude, the AI assistant made by Anthropic, is good at all of these.

This post covers the ways to get your transcripts in front of Claude, from simple copy and paste to connecting Claude directly to your meetings, plus prompts that work well. We make Hark, which includes one of these options, so we’ll be clear about where it fits.

Option 1: Paste or upload the transcript

The simplest approach works with any transcription tool. Export or copy the transcript, then paste it into a conversation with Claude, or attach it as a text file.

A few tips make this work better:

• Keep speaker labels. “Speaker 1” is fine, but real names are much better. Claude can only attribute decisions and action items to people if the transcript says who spoke.
• Add context at the top. One or two lines saying what the meeting was, who was there and what you need makes the result far more useful than the transcript alone.
• Include timestamps if you have them. They let you ask Claude to point to roughly when something was said, so you can check it against the recording.
• Correct names first. Speech recognition often mishears names and jargon. Fixing the obvious ones before pasting saves Claude from repeating the mistakes.

Long meetings make long transcripts, but Claude’s context window comfortably fits a typical meeting. For a series of related meetings, a Claude Project lets you add several transcripts as project knowledge and ask questions across all of them.

Prompts that work well

You don’t need elaborate prompts. Clear instructions about the output you want matter more than clever wording. Some starting points:

Meeting notes

Write meeting notes from this transcript. Start with a three-sentence summary, then list decisions, then action items with the owner and any deadline mentioned. Only include what was actually said.

The last sentence matters. Asking Claude to stick to the transcript reduces the chance it fills gaps with plausible guesses.

Action items only

List every action item from this meeting as a table: task, owner, deadline (or “not stated”), and the speaker who raised it.

A follow-up email

Draft a short follow-up email to the client summarising what we agreed and the next steps. Friendly, plain language, no jargon.

Questions about the meeting

Did anyone raise concerns about the budget? Quote the relevant lines with their speakers.

Asking for quotes is a useful habit: it lets you check Claude’s answer against the transcript rather than trusting a summary.

Notes in a house style

If you have a format your team uses, paste an example and ask Claude to follow it. Our meeting minutes template and meeting summary template are good starting points.

Option 2: Let Claude read your meetings directly (MCP)

Copying and pasting works, but it gets tedious, and Claude only knows about the transcripts you’ve given it. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) fixes that. MCP is an open standard that lets Claude connect to other apps and use them through “tools”: small, well-defined actions such as “list meetings” or “search transcripts”.

With an MCP connection, you can just ask:

• “What did we decide in Tuesday’s planning meeting?"
• "Find every meeting where pricing came up this month and summarise what was said."
• "Write notes for my last meeting using one of my note styles.”

Claude decides which tools to use, fetches what it needs and answers, without you exporting anything.

How Hark’s MCP server works

Hark runs a small MCP server on your own computer while Hark is open. It only listens locally, so it’s reachable from your computer and not from the internet. Through it, Claude Desktop or Claude Code can:

• list and search your meetings and transcripts;
• read a meeting’s full transcript, notes and speakers;
• look up people you’ve named, along with any details you’ve added for them;
• follow the live transcript of a meeting while it is being recorded;
• start, stop and mute recording, name speakers and update people.

If you’ve chosen to download your email into Hark (Gmail, Outlook/Office 365 or any IMAP account), Claude can also search it, so it can connect a meeting with the email thread that led to it. Email stays on your computer.

This connection uses your own Claude subscription. Hark’s MCP server is free, and you don’t need a Hark subscription to use it. When Claude reads a transcript through MCP, that text goes to Claude as part of your conversation, under your Claude plan’s terms, just as if you’d pasted it.

Setting it up

Hark has a Connect Claude page that does the setup for you.

• Claude Desktop: Hark can add itself to Claude Desktop’s settings file (it keeps your other settings and makes a backup of the old file). Restart Claude Desktop and Hark’s tools appear. If you’d rather edit the file yourself, the page shows the exact settings to paste.
• Claude Code: the page gives you a single command to run once in a terminal. It uses claude mcp add to register Hark for all your projects.

After that, Hark needs to be open for Claude to reach it.

Using it during a meeting

Because Claude can read the live transcript, you can use it while a meeting is still going. Ask Claude Desktop “what has been said about the timeline so far?” or “what questions are still unanswered?” while the call continues. With Claude Code, a developer can ask for an outline of a technical discussion as it happens.

The Claude meeting notes page has more examples.

Option 3: AI notes built into Hark

If you don’t use Claude Desktop or Claude Code, Hark’s subscription ($12/month, with a 2-day preview for new accounts) has Claude built in. It writes meeting notes in a choice of styles (or your own), titles meetings automatically, proofreads the transcript against your list of names and terms, and can take live notes during a meeting. These features send the transcript text (not audio) to Claude through our service. More in free forever: how Hark’s pricing works.

Getting better results

Whichever route you choose, a few things make a big difference:

1. Good transcripts make good notes. Accurate speaker names are the most valuable improvement. Hark recognises voices you’ve named before, which helps. See how Hark recognises voices.
2. Ask for evidence. Request quotes or timestamps for important claims, and check anything you’re going to act on.
3. Say what to leave out. Small talk, tangents and off-the-record remarks don’t belong in shared notes.
4. Keep a human in the loop. AI notes are a draft. Read them before you send them to anyone.

A word on privacy and consent

Sending a transcript to any AI service shares what people said with that service. Before you do, think about whether the people in the meeting would expect that, and check your organisation’s rules. Our Claude AI review summarises what Anthropic says about how it handles conversations.

And before any of this, the recording itself needs consent. Some places require everyone in a conversation to agree to being recorded. Tell people at the start.

Try it

Hark is free for Windows, macOS and Linux, including the MCP server for Claude Desktop and Claude Code. Download Hark and open the Connect Claude page to get started.