Parliamentary sitting transcripts: Assemblée nationale, Sénat, committees and hearings
A hearing ends at 11.40 p.m. The next morning, your client — or your management — wants to know exactly what the rapporteur said about Article 4: the quote, the time, the link. The official record is not online yet, the video runs three hours, and nobody on the team has time to sit through it again. That is the problem parliamentary sitting transcripts solve.
This page is written for consultants in public affairs firms, for public affairs leads in companies and trade federations, and for the analysts and monitoring officers who are asked for a reliable verbatim within the day. It sets out what official records do — and do not — cover, what a timestamped transcript adds, and how Polyfact handles the transcription of debates in the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and the European Parliament.
The principle fits in one sentence: in public affairs, a transcript is only worth something if it can be quoted. You need to know who is speaking, at which second, and be able to point back to the source.
The problem: what manual transcription of debates really costs
The material is public. The Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and the European Parliament broadcast their sittings and most of their committee meetings, and they publish written records. So access is not the problem: timing, coverage and form are.
Timing first. At the Assemblée nationale the compte rendu intégral of a sitting is released as it is written, and the Assemblée states that the whole sitting is available online on average six hours after the end of morning and afternoon sittings, and in the early afternoon of the next day for night sittings. At the Sénat, the compte rendu intégral is published online within 24 to 36 hours; the compte rendu analytique, which is only a summary of the debate, arrives in less than two hours. A night sitting that ends at one in the morning will therefore only be readable after the next day's team meeting — exactly when your note is expected.
Form next. The official record is not a verbatim, and the Assemblée says so plainly: the record, it writes, is not word for word, since transposing speech into written language has to remove the imprecisions and imperfections of the spoken word. It is a reliable, readable document, but it is not the sentence that was spoken. When the point is to quote a rapporteur or a minister word for word, in a note that will circulate, that difference matters.
Coverage last. The Assemblée's records directorate produces the records of the legislative work of the eight standing committees, of joint committees (commissions mixtes paritaires), of hearings of government ministers, of committees of inquiry and of fact-finding missions. But it also states that part of the records is still handled by committee secretariats, or even by external providers, and that some meetings are only captured on video. For those meetings the video is the only trace: if you need a record of a hearing, you will have to write it yourself.
That is where the cost appears. Transcribing three hours of hearing by hand means listening, rewinding, working out who is speaking — speakers do not introduce themselves —, noting the timecode, copying out the useful passages, then checking. A full afternoon for a single meeting. Multiply that by the number of files you follow, or by the number of clients in a firm, and public affairs monitoring turns into data entry rather than analysis.
- Listening time: a committee meeting rarely runs under two hours, and what matters often fits in four minutes.
- Speaker attribution: on a committee recording, nobody states their name before speaking.
- Timecodes: without a timestamp a quote cannot be checked — there is no way to send a client or a board straight to the exact second.
- Memory: a transcript dropped into a Word file is never found again three months later, when the same issue comes back through the parliamentary shuttle.
- Risk: a sentence half-heard, then repeated in a note sent to a client, is expensive.
What a good parliamentary transcription tool has to cover
Before comparing offers, it helps to write down the capabilities you actually need. The list is short, but every line counts: a tool that is missing one sends you back to manual work.
At Polyfact these capabilities map to named building blocks — Videos for timestamped transcription, Documents for cross-source search, Briefings for the written brief, Alerts for notification, Agenda for the committee calendar. If you are at the comparison stage, our comparison of public affairs monitoring tools reviews the alternatives on the market, including those that only handle text.
- Go beyond the plenary sitting. Plenary is the best-documented part; the useful information often plays out in committee and in hearings. A parliamentary debate transcription tool has to handle both, not just the chamber.
- Attribute every intervention to its author, so you can retrieve what one specific rapporteur said across a whole bill, sitting after sitting.
- Timestamp to the second, so every quote points to the exact moment in the video and stays verifiable by whoever receives it.
- Search speech the way you search documents: a single query should dig through transcripts, official texts and the press at the same time.
- Summarise by speaker, to turn three hours of meeting into a brief a management team will actually read.
- Notify you as soon as your issue is spoken about, without watching the live stream or opening each chamber's portal.
- Tell you in advance which meeting is worth following: the committee calendar and amendment filing deadlines are part of the same monitoring routine.
- Make every sentence traceable back to its source. A tool that summarises without references is a black box: impossible to quote, impossible to defend in front of a management team.
How Polyfact does it
Polyfact treats video as a first-class source, on a par with text. Debates from the Assemblée, the Sénat, the regulators and Brussels are transcribed, summarised and indexed by speaker. You search for a sentence, you land on the exact second, you copy the quote with its source.
As of 31 July 2026 the corpus holds over 27,000 indexed institutional and media videos, more than 16,000 of them transcribed and timestamped. For the chambers, that means over 17,000 videos from the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and the European Parliament, more than 10,000 of them transcribed — the Assemblée nationale alone accounting for over 11,000 videos, more than 9,000 of them transcribed and indexed by speaker.
No black box: every claim links back to its source — the official document, the amendment, or the exact second of video. The summary gives you the passage, the passage gives you the player cued to the right moment, the player gives you the official link. You quote what was actually said, not a corridor rumour.
Transcription does not live on its own. One query spans speech and text: the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat, Légifrance and the official journal, French regulators and independent authorities, EU institutions, the press and X. We make no claim to be exhaustive, and coverage is published: 60 institutions connected out of 489 catalogued, across ten countries where we already collect. The Coverage page shows what is connected and what is not yet.
The outcome is a working routine, not a feature: a committee finishes late, the recording is transcribed and indexed, and the next morning a keyword search hands you the intervention, the speaker, the minute and the link — enough to write the note before the first coffee.
| Official record | Raw automatic transcription | Polyfact | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turnaround | About six hours after morning and afternoon sittings at the Assemblée; 24 to 36 hours at the Sénat for the compte rendu intégral | Depends on the pipeline you build | Automated processing of the video corpus, with no work from your team |
| Faithfulness to the spoken word | Transposition into written language, explicitly not word for word | Verbatim, but unformatted | Copyable verbatim, linked back to the original video |
| Plenary sittings | Covered | Only the video you supply | Covered |
| Committees and hearings | Partly covered; some meetings are only captured on video | Only the video you supply | Transcribed where the recording exists in the corpus |
| Speaker attribution | Yes | Varies by tool | Indexed by speaker |
| Timestamps | No | Varies by tool | To the second, with a link to the passage |
| Cross-search with the texts | No | No | Yes: text and video in the same query |
Use cases, by role
The same product serves a different purpose depending on the job. Four situations come up again and again.
In all four, the transcript is only one building block: it becomes valuable once it is tied to the rest of the file — the committee agenda, the amendments filed, the texts published. That is the difference between a full parliamentary monitoring platform and a transcription service billed by the hour.
And if your scope goes beyond Parliament — decrees in the official journal, regulator opinions, public consultations, EU texts — you are in the territory of a legislative monitoring tool, where sitting transcripts are one layer among several.
- Consultant in a public affairs firm — you follow five files for five clients. A hearing takes place on one of them: you want the passage, the quote and the link, not the whole video. Search by speaker gives you all three in minutes, and the brief goes out the same evening.
- Public affairs lead in a company — your executive committee will not read a three-hour record. It will read six lines on what the rapporteur said about your sector, with a link to the exact second if it wants to check.
- Trade federation or professional union — your members expect the position taken by each political group. Retrieving, bill after bill, what the same member said in committee and then in plenary becomes a search rather than an excavation.
- Analyst or monitoring officer — you are the one asked for the evidence. Timestamps and source links turn your note into a checkable document, and you no longer have to replay two hours to find a sentence you heard last week.
Frequently asked questions
Official records are published on the Assemblée nationale website, then in the Journal officiel on Légifrance, since Article 33 of the Constitution requires publication of the full record of debates. A morning or afternoon sitting is online on average six hours after it ends; for a night sitting you have to wait until the early afternoon of the following day. Polyfact adds the transcript of the video recording, indexed by speaker and timestamped, for the cases where you cannot wait, or where you need the words as they were actually spoken.
No. The Assemblée nationale's records directorate covers the legislative work of the eight standing committees, joint committees, hearings of government ministers, committees of inquiry and fact-finding missions; part of the records is still handled by committee secretariats or by external providers, and some meetings are only captured on video. In that last case the video is the only trace, and a transcript is the only way to search it.
The compte rendu intégral is not a verbatim: the Assemblée nationale's records directorate states that the record is not word for word, because transposing speech into written language has to remove the imprecisions of oral expression. It is an official, reliable, readable document, and it is the one that counts legally. A transcript reproduces the sentence as it was spoken. Both are useful: the official record for the legal reference, the transcript to quote, search and jump back to a passage at the exact second.
Yes, as long as the debates have been transcribed. At Polyfact the search runs on the transcript and takes you to the second where the sentence is spoken; the same query also covers official documents, amendments and the press. That is what separates searching speech from searching a document engine, which only sees what was written down.
All three chambers are in the corpus: over 17,000 videos from the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and the European Parliament, more than 10,000 of them transcribed, within a wider set of over 27,000 indexed institutional and media videos. Coverage is partial and published: the Coverage page lists the institutions already connected — 60 out of 489 catalogued — and those still to come.
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Book a 20-minute demo with our team: we start from a committee you already follow and show you the transcript, the timestamp and the quote ready to paste. We reply within 24 hours.