A transcript is a complete, ordered record of what was said in a recording — every sentence, from every speaker, in the sequence it happened. Minutes are a summary pulled from that transcript: the decisions that got made, the actions someone took on, and the questions that stayed open, with the small talk and the back-and-forth left out. A transcript answers "what was said"; minutes answer "what happened."
Why a transcript alone usually isn't enough
A forty-minute meeting produces a transcript nobody wants to re-read in full to find the one line that mattered. It's complete, which is exactly its weakness for a quick check-in: finding "did we agree on the launch date" means scanning past everything that wasn't that. Minutes exist because most people, most of the time, want the outcome rather than the record — and want it in the time it takes to read a paragraph, not the time it took to hold the meeting.
Why the transcript still matters
Minutes are a summary, and a summary can miss a qualifier, an exact number, or a change of mind partway through a sentence — the kind of detail that reads as noise when a person or a model is condensing forty minutes into five sentences. When something in the minutes doesn't match what someone remembers saying, the transcript is where that gets settled, because it's the only one of the two that's a direct record rather than an interpretation of one.
How they're produced, in practice
The transcript comes first, built from the recording as it happens — usually with speaker diarization attached, so each line carries who said it. The minutes are generated afterward, from that transcript, by pulling out anything that reads as a decision, an action someone owns, or a question nobody answered. Coii AudioNotes does both: the transcript builds segment by segment while the meeting runs, and the summary is produced afterward on the same machine, from your notes and the transcript together, with nothing sent anywhere to make either one.
Where each one is worth keeping
A transcript earns its keep for anything with legal or factual weight — an interview, a deposition, a session where the exact wording could be quoted back later. Minutes earn theirs for anything recurring, where the point is to track what changed since last time: a one-on-one between a manager and a report, or a board meeting where the record that matters is who moved what, not the full discussion that got them there. Most meetings are worth keeping both for — the minutes for the five-second read, the transcript for the one time a year someone needs to check exactly what was said. What an AI notetaker generally does with a recording, transcript through summary, is covered in what is an AI notetaker, and how the two compare across a specific tool in Coii AudioNotes against Otter.