Turn audio recordings into mind maps
SpawnGraph does not transcribe audio — let us be upfront about that. What it does is take a transcript and structure it into a visual mind map that you can actually navigate. The workflow is two steps: transcribe your audio with any tool you already use, then paste the text into SpawnGraph. The whole thing takes a few minutes and turns an hour of audio into a map you can share in a Slack message.
The workflow
- 1Transcribe the audio. Use Whisper (free, runs locally), Otter.ai, your meeting platform's built-in transcription (Google Meet, Zoom, Teams), or any other transcription tool. Export or copy the text transcript.
- 2Paste the transcript into SpawnGraph. SpawnGraph's in-browser NLP detects topic shifts, speaker turns, and structural markers in the text and organises them into a hierarchical map.
- 3Edit and share. Rename branches, highlight action items, collapse the tangents, and share the map link with everyone who was in the meeting — or everyone who was not.
Which transcription tool should you use?
It depends on your setup. Whisper is the best free option — it is open-source, runs on your own machine, and produces accurate transcripts for most audio quality levels. Good for privacy-sensitive recordings. Otter.ai works well for live meetings and produces speaker-labelled output that maps cleanly. Google Meet and Zoom both have built-in transcription in their free and paid tiers — if you already recorded the meeting there, just download the transcript. For podcasts and lecture recordings, Descript produces clean structured output. The point is: use whatever you already have. SpawnGraph takes the text from any of them.
Why a map beats a transcript wall
Transcripts are hard to navigate. An hour-long meeting produces eight to twelve thousand words of unstructured text. You cannot skim it the way you can skim a document. A mind map gives you the navigation layer that transcripts lack: topics at the top level, sub-points underneath, decisions and action items pulled out into their own branches. You can share a link to the map and someone can understand the full meeting in three minutes instead of reading for forty.
Lecture recordings and podcast interviews
This workflow is not just for meetings. Lecture recordings are common for students who want to process audio from a class they attended or watch again later. Podcast interviews — especially long-form conversations — often contain dense information that deserves a structural overview. Research interviews that you have recorded and transcribed for qualitative analysis map well too: themes emerge naturally when you run the transcript through SpawnGraph.
Transcript text stays in your browser
When you paste a transcript into SpawnGraph, the text is processed in-browser using client-side NLP. It is not sent to a server and not retained anywhere. Meeting transcripts often contain confidential discussions; the privacy model here is as strong as the local parsing — nothing leaves your tab.
In short: Transcribe your audio with Whisper, Otter, or your meeting platform. Paste the transcript into SpawnGraph. Get a navigable, shareable mind map in seconds. Free, no signup, nothing uploaded.