The Step-by-Step Guide to Automating Meeting Tasks with Whisper

You already know how the post-meeting slump feels. You just spent an hour on a high-energy client call, hashing out a massive project scope. Now, instead of executing on that momentum, you have to spend 45 minutes re-listening to the recording, typing up messy notes, and manually creating 14 different task tickets in Jira. Every minute you spend doing administrative data entry is a minute you aren't actually building the project.\n\nThe average project manager spends 8 hours per week solely on post-meeting documentation and task delegation. That's one full working day — every single week — acting as a human transcriptionist. If your time is worth $100/hr, that's $41,000/year wasted on administrative overhead. This guide shows you how to get that back by automating your meeting-to-task pipeline with Whisper, Claude AI, and Asana/Jira.\n\n## What the Meeting-to-Task Pipeline Actually Does\n\nHere's the full loop in plain language:\n\n1. A meeting recording (audio or video) is uploaded to a designated Google Drive folder (trigger).\n2. The system passes the audio file to OpenAI's Whisper model for flawless, human-level transcription.\n3. The raw transcript is sent to claude-3-opus-20240229 to analyze the conversation and extract distinct action items.\n4. Claude formats these action items into a structured JSON payload containing task titles, descriptions, and assignees.\n5. The workflow automatically creates live, assigned tickets in Jira, Asana, or Linear.\n\nTotal time from trigger to output: under 3 minutes. \nYour involvement: Dropping an MP4 file into a folder.\n\nResult: A perfectly organized project board full of assigned tickets, created instantly after you hang up the call.\n\n## Who This Is Built For\n\nThis workflow is for:\n\n- Project Managers dealing with high-volume sprint planning meetings and struggling to keep documentation updated.\n- Agency Founders who take discovery calls and need technical scope instantly translated into developer tasks.\n- Software Engineering Teams tired of losing feature requests because nobody wrote them down during the daily standup.\n\nThis is not for highly confidential HR disciplinary meetings — if the conversation involves highly sensitive PII, automated third-party transcription APIs pose a compliance risk.\n\n## What This Keeps Costing You\n\nWithout this workflow, here's what next week looks like:\n\n- Spending 1-2 hours daily translating conversational chatter into structured Jira tickets.\n- Losing $800+ weekly in valuable executive time spent on clerical work.\n- The hidden cost of dropped balls: crucial tasks are forgotten because someone thought "someone else wrote that down."

Context loss from poorly written task descriptions that lack the nuance of the original verbal discussion.\n- Opportunity cost of not starting the actual work immediately because you are stuck organizing the work.\n\nThe real issue isn't the time itself — it's the friction between strategy and execution. Here's how to eliminate that friction entirely.\n\n## How to Build It: Step by Step\n\n### Step 1: Set Up the Google Drive Trigger\n\nThe foundation is catching the raw audio. Create a new automation in Make.com or n8n using the Google Drive "Watch Files in Folder" trigger. Select a specific folder named "Meeting Processing." \nWhenever your Zoom or Google Meet automatically saves a recording here, the workflow fires immediately.

{
  "name": "Watch Drive Folder",
  "type": "n8n-nodes-base.googleDrive",
  "position": [250, 300],
  "parameters": {
    "triggerOn": "fileAdded",
    "folderId": "1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h9i0j"
  }
}

Watch out for: File formats. Ensure your trigger only watches for .mp3, .m4a, or .mp4 files to avoid triggering on random document uploads.\n\n### Step 2: Flawless Transcription with Whisper\n\nRaw audio is useless to an LLM. We need text. Use the HTTP Request node to call OpenAI's Whisper API endpoint. Whisper is the industry standard for transcription, handling heavy accents, background noise, and overlapping speech far better than legacy tools.\n\nPass the file data directly into the API request.\n\n```json { "name": "Whisper Transcription", "type": "n8n-nodes-base.httpRequest", "position": [450, 300], "parameters": { "url": "https://api.openai.com/v1/audio/transcriptions", "method": "POST", "authentication": "headerAuth", "sendBody": true, "contentType": "multipart-form-data" } }


**Watch out for**: OpenAI's Whisper API has a strict 25MB file size limit. If your meetings are 2 hours long, you will need to add a pre-processing step (like an FFmpeg node) to split the audio into chunks before sending it.\n\n### Step 3: Extract Action Items with Claude AI\n\nConnect the Anthropic node and select `claude-3-opus-20240229`. We will pass the raw, unpunctuated text from Whisper and ask Claude to act as a Senior Project Manager.\n\nProvide your team's names so Claude can accurately map conversational assignees to actual system users.\n\n```text
Act as a Senior Technical Project Manager. Analyze this meeting transcript and extract all Action Items.\n\nTeam Members:\n- Sarah (Frontend)\n- Mike (Backend)\n- Jessica (Design)\n\nRules:\n1. Ignore all small talk and brainstorming. Extract only concrete tasks.\n2. Write a detailed description for each task based on the context of the conversation.\n3. Assign it to the correct team member.\n\nReturn ONLY a JSON array of objects with keys: "title", "description", "assignee".\n\nTranscript: {{$json.text}}

Watch out for: If Claude can't determine who a task belongs to, it might hallucinate an assignee. Add a rule instructing it to use "Unassigned" if the owner is ambiguous.\n\n### Step 4: Create Tasks in Jira/Asana\n\nNow we take Claude's JSON output and turn it into reality. Add an "Item Lists" or "Split In Batches" node to iterate over the array of tasks. \n\nConnect the Jira Software (or Asana) node. Map the JSON fields to create a new Issue for every item in the array.\n\n```json { "name": "Create Jira Issue", "type": "n8n-nodes-base.jira", "position": [850, 300], "parameters": { "resource": "issue", "operation": "create", "project": "ENG", "issueType": "Task", "summary": "={{$json.title}}", "description": "={{$json.description}}" } }


**Watch out for**: User ID mapping. Jira requires account IDs, not just names like "Sarah." You must include a switch or code node that translates the name Claude outputs into the correct alphanumeric Jira Account ID.\n\n### Step 5: Notify the Team\n\nFinally, add a Slack node that sends a summary of all created tickets to the project channel. This provides visibility and ensures everyone knows their post-meeting tasks are live.\n\n```javascript
// Slack message mapping
"✅ Meeting Processed. Created 4 new Jira tickets:\\n- Update API schema (Assigned: Mike)\\n- Draft new hero copy (Assigned: Sarah)"

Tools Used (And Why Each One)\n\nn8n — The workflow orchestration layer. Chosen over Zapier because handling large binary files (audio) and iterating over complex JSON arrays is significantly cheaper and more robust in n8n. Pricing: Free (Self-hosted) or $24/month. Free alternative: Make.com.\n\nOpenAI Whisper — The transcription engine. Chosen over Google Cloud Speech-to-Text because Whisper is vastly superior at understanding technical jargon and multi-speaker overlapping dialogue. Pricing: $0.006/minute. Free alternative: Local Whisper deployment via Python.\n\nAnthropic Claude 3 — The logic layer. Chosen over GPT-4o because Claude's ability to maintain context over a dense, hour-long transcript and extract precise technical requirements without summarizing too heavily is currently unmatched. Pricing: $15/million tokens.\n\n## Real-World Example: Mike's Story\n\nMike manages a 12-person software engineering team and was spending 10 hours a week trapped in sprint planning and backlog grooming meetings. His biggest frustration was the "post-meeting sync" where he had to translate whiteboard ideas into Jira epics.\n\nBefore the automation, developers were constantly pinging Mike asking, "What exactly did the client say about this feature again?" because his manual Jira descriptions were too brief.\n\nHe set up this Whisper + Claude workflow in an afternoon. The first week: he recorded 4 client discovery calls. The system instantly generated 35 detailed Jira tickets. Because Claude included exact quotes and context from the transcript in the descriptions, the developers had perfect clarity on the requirements.\nBy month two, Mike's team velocity increased by 20% simply because there was zero lag time between a decision being made and a task being actionable.\n\nResult: 10 hours/week saved → 0 hours/week. Mike removed himself as the administrative bottleneck, allowing him to focus on actual code architecture instead of ticket writing.\n\n## Gotchas, Edge Cases, and Hard-Won Tips\n\nTip: Audio quality matters. Whisper is magic, but it can't fix a terrible microphone. Insist your team uses headsets. Bad audio = bad transcripts = terrible Jira tickets.\n\nWatch out: Vague conversation. AI can't invent decisions. If you end a meeting by saying "We'll figure this out later," Claude won't make a task for it. You must adopt a habit of verbally stating, "Okay, Sarah, your task is to..." to give the AI clear signals.\n\nTip: Include the transcript link in the ticket. Always map a Google Docs link containing the full meeting transcript into the Jira ticket description so developers can read the surrounding context if they get confused.\n\nGotcha: Duplicate tickets. If you discuss an existing ticket in a meeting, the AI might create a duplicate task. Prompt Claude to "Only extract NEW tasks, ignore status updates on existing work."

\n## What It Costs and What You Get Back\n\n| Item | Before | After |\n|------|--------|-------| | Time on documentation | 8 hrs/week | 0 hrs/week | | Infrastructure cost | $0 | $24/month | | API cost (at 10 hours audio) | $0 | $8/month | | Net weekly time recovered | — | 8 hrs | \nValuing your time at $100/hr:\n- Weekly value recovered: 8 hrs × $100 = $800/week\n- Monthly infrastructure cost: $32\n- Net monthly ROI: $3,168\n\nBreak-even: First meeting processed.\n\n## Start Building Today\n\nAutomating your meeting-to-task pipeline removes the administrative drag from your agency or software team.\n\nHere's how to start in the next 60 minutes:\n\n1. Connect your Google Drive and Jira accounts to an n8n instance.\n2. Get API keys from OpenAI (for Whisper) and Anthropic (for Claude).\n3. Record a 5-minute fake meeting on your phone discussing fake tasks.\n4. Drop the audio file into the trigger folder.\n5. Watch your Jira board instantly populate with perfectly formatted tickets.\n\nStop acting like a highly-paid stenographer. Let the AI do the typing, so you can do the building.\n\n[related workflow: AI Lead Generation System]