Search meeting recordings: preserve speaker turns and audio evidence

Meeting search needs evidence tied to the recording, not just a polished transcript with speaker names attached. Preserve words, timing and speaker assignments as separate layers so a search result can be checked against the original exchange, including interruptions and later corrections.

Separate the speech-processing layers

The WhisperX repository combines transcription, alignment and diarization-related steps. The alignment paper explains the timing approach. Recognized words, aligned times and speaker labels answer different questions: what was said, when it occurred and which anonymous speaker segment overlapped it. A later summarizer should not overwrite these source layers with a cleaned narrative that cannot be traced back to the audio.

Keep speaker labels provisional

The official Community-1 diarization card describes regular and exclusive speaker outputs. An anonymous label is not a verified person’s identity. Map labels to names only through a separate reviewed process, retaining uncertainty. Overlapping speech can make a clean single-speaker transcript misleading. Keep the original diarization available even if an exclusive representation helps assign transcript words to one speaker for a readable view.

Test a correction during an interruption

Create a fixture where a participant proposes a delivery date and another participant corrects it during an interruption. Search for the agreed date. The result must include enough neighboring exchange to distinguish proposal from correction. Retrieving only the first fluent sentence can produce a confident but obsolete meeting answer even when transcription of that sentence is completely accurate.

Evidence field	Why it matters
Original word sequence	Preserves proposal and correction
Recording time span	Enables direct playback verification
Anonymous speaker label	Separates turns without inventing identity
Nearby exchange	Establishes whether a statement was accepted

Construct searchable spans carefully

Group words into spans using conversational boundaries, not arbitrary token counts alone. Keep the recording identifier and original timing through normalization. A search excerpt can include contextual words outside its main match, but distinguish that context from a verbatim quote. If a word lacks reliable alignment, preserve its text and mark timing uncertainty rather than discarding the word or inventing a precise start time.

Evaluate source-grounded meeting answers

Test questions about decisions, rejected proposals and speaker attribution separately. Inspect whether retrieved spans establish the requested fact or merely mention its topic. Keep corrections and uncertain identities visible in the review artifact. Search success is a resolvable evidence span, not a convincing summary. This makes meeting retrieval useful while avoiding unsupported claims about who agreed to what or exactly when an uncertain word occurred.