Some companies have their annual meetings transcribed. It’s so easy to do today. It can be done in a jiffy by a dictation bot. But whether to make that transcript publicly available is a whole other question.

Although not required by law, some companies transcribe their annual meetings so they can give a quick check and ensure nothing was said that shouldn’t have been. Reg FD violations and the such.

There are dozens of free transcription services that can convert an audio file in minutes. The transcript won’t be polished — but it doesn’t need to be if you’re giving it a quick once-over. Of course, you may not need to do this if you have a video archive of the event – you can just watch that for your purposes.

But some companies actually post transcripts of their annual meetings on their IR webpage. They’ll edit those — polish them up — so it’s not a raw, unreadable document. The edits are not substantive, just cosmetic.

They might do this to appear more transparent to shareholders. They may do this so that they have a polished version out there, so that folks wanting to see a transcript will look at that rather than other raw versions that might be posted somewhere else online that’s not within the company’s control.

Note that some companies decide not to post a full transcript. They may just post a transcript from the general session but not include the Q&A session at the end. Other companies decide to just post the deck used during the general session rather than a transcript. Practice varies, including not posting anything from the annual meeting at all…