Meetings are expensive. The research is unambiguous.

Published studies from Harvard Business Review, Microsoft, Atlassian, Doodle and others converge on the same picture: the average knowledge worker loses roughly 18 hours a week to meetings — and tens of thousands a year to the unnecessary ones. The figures below are drawn from those sources and linked directly, so they can be checked, not taken on faith.

Transcriber was built to recover that time: every meeting becomes a speaker-labelled transcript with automatic notes and action items, plus an assistant that answers from your own files, PDFs and code during the call. Modelled saving, conservatively: 3–6 hours per person per week.

~18 hrs/wk
the average employee spends in meetings — ~6 of them unproductive.
Otter / Rogelberg, 2022
~23 hrs/wk
executives now spend in meetings — up from <10 in the 1960s.
HBR, 2017
$25,000
wasted per employee per year on meetings deemed completely unnecessary (31% of meeting cost).
Otter / Rogelberg, 2022
~$399B
lost each year in the U.S. to poorly organized meetings (study of 19M meetings).
Doodle, 2019
72%
of meetings are rated ineffective; 80% would rather have fewer.
Atlassian, 2025
54%
leave meetings unsure of next steps or who owns which task.
Atlassian, 2025
57%
of meetings are ad-hoc calls with no invite — no agenda, no notes.
Microsoft, 2025
~23 min
to fully refocus after each interruption around a meeting.
Gloria Mark, UC Irvine

What you save, by industry

Modeled per person per month — no manual notes, instant searchable transcripts, auto-captured action items, and fewer "what did we decide?" re-meetings. Conservative estimates; assumptions below.

IndustrySaved / person / moWhy
Legal€1,935–2,900Searchable intake/strategy transcripts; the assistant surfaces clauses from case files mid-call.
Healthcare€1,550–2,580Clinicians focus on the patient; structured summaries + handoff notes auto-generated (with consent).
Consulting€1,550–1,935Billable hours stop leaking into write-ups; searchable client history; live pull from prior decks.
Sales€775–1,160Stay present with the prospect; CRM-ready notes + next steps captured automatically.
Recruiting / HR€860–1,200Highest meeting volume; structured interview notes + scorecards, searchable across the funnel.
Software / tech€775–1,030Decisions + tickets from standups/planning; the assistant answers from the repo during the call.
Media / journalism€690–1,030Interview transcription is the grind — diarized, searchable, quote-accurate.
Education€300–525Lectures become searchable study material; faculty/admin meetings auto-summarized.

Assumptions: ~20–30 min saved per note-worthy meeting (write-up + action items + fewer re-meetings); loaded hourly rates by sector; 4.3 weeks/month. Per-person ranges — the point is the multiplier across a team.

Three ways to use it

  • Upload a recording → diarized transcript + notes/tickets in minutes.
  • Live → real-time transcript + notes as you talk, in-person or on a call.
  • Assistant → point an AI agent at your project (code, docs, specs, PDFs) and it answers questions live during the meeting.

Get started — free