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Automating Meeting Notes from Video. A Complete Solution for Transcription

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Automating Meeting Notes from Video: A Complete Solution for Transcription, Summarization, and Translation
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Automating Meeting Notes from Video: A Complete Solution for Transcription, Summarization, and Translation

In today’s remote-first world, the need to capture and share meeting insights accurately is more important than ever. Whether for follow-up, archiving, or simply making meetings accessible to a wider team, having clear, concise meeting notes is essential. In this post, I’ll introduce you to a powerful tool that automates this process by extracting, transcribing, summarizing, and translating meeting notes from video files—making it easier than ever to convert raw video into structured, useful information.

You can find the full source code for this project on GitHub: Video Meeting Notes Extraction

Project Overview

The Video Meeting Notes Extraction tool was built to streamline the task of capturing key points from video recordings. It takes a video file, processes the audio to generate a transcription, summarizes it into structured notes, and finally translates the notes into Vietnamese. The whole workflow can be managed locally or in a Docker container, making it adaptable to various setups.

Key Features

  1. Audio Extraction: The tool starts by pulling audio from a video file, allowing further processing.
  2. Transcription: Leveraging the powerful Whisper model, it converts the audio into text.
  3. Summarization: The transcription is condensed into meeting notes, focusing on core insights.
  4. Translation: For multilingual accessibility, the notes are translated into Vietnamese.

Getting Started: Prerequisites

To get started, ensure that you have the following:

  • Python 3.9 or higher
  • ffmpeg for audio processing

Setting Up Your Environment

  1. Clone the Repository

    git clone <repository-url>
cd video-meeting-notes

  2. Create a Virtual Environment

    python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate # Linux/macOS
.venv\Scripts\activate # Windows

  3. Install Dependencies

    pip install -r requirements.txt

  4. Install ffmpeg (if not already installed)

    sudo apt install ffmpeg # Linux
brew install ffmpeg # macOS
choco install ffmpeg # Windows

Running the Script Locally

Place your video file in the data/ directory and name it meeting_video.mov for easy access. Then, execute the script as follows:

python src/extract_meeting_notes.py

The script will process the video, extract audio, transcribe it, summarize the content, and translate the notes into Vietnamese. The final output will be saved in the output directory.

Output Files

  • Full Transcription: Saved as output/full_transcript.txt
  • Summarized Notes: Saved as output/meeting_notes.txt
  • Vietnamese Translation: Saved as output/meeting_notes_vi.txt

To streamline the process, a shell script (run_local_setup.sh) is also included. Running this script automates the setup and execution in one step:

Running in Docker

For those who prefer using Docker, this tool provides full support. This approach ensures compatibility across systems and removes any environment-specific dependencies.

  1. Build the Docker Image:
    docker build -t meeting-notes-extractor .
  2. Run the Docker Container:
    docker run --rm -v $(pwd)/data:/app/data -v $(pwd)/output:/app/output meeting-notes-extractor

The script will run inside the Docker container, processing the video file and generating the output files in the output directory.

Technical Highlights: Libraries and Tools

The tool utilizes various powerful Python libraries:

  • Whisper for transcription
  • pydub for audio processing
  • sumy for text summarization
  • transformers (MarianMT) for translation
  • nltk for tokenization

Troubleshooting Common Issues

  • ffmpeg not found: Ensure ffmpeg is installed and available in your system path.
  • sentencepiece not found: Run pip install sentencepiece if you encounter this error.

License

This project is open-source under the MIT License, allowing anyone to adapt and expand it further.

Conclusion

By automating the process of extracting, transcribing, summarizing, and translating meeting notes from video files, this tool offers a comprehensive solution for capturing insights efficiently. Whether you’re looking to streamline your workflow, improve accessibility, or simply save time, the Video Meeting Notes Extraction tool is a powerful addition to your toolkit. Try it out today and see the difference it can make in your meetings!

Thank you for reading. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out. Happy coding!

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