AVAY

Meeting Transcription for Regulated Industries

21 August 2026

Meeting transcription for regulated industries means treating the transcript itself as a compliance artifact — subject to residency, retention, deletion and processor obligations — not as a convenience layer bolted onto a call. A vendor's SOC 2 report or marketing page saying 'we're compliant' answers a different question than the one your auditor asks, which is whether this specific deployment, configured this specific way, meets the rule that applies to this specific conversation. That gap is where most rollouts actually stall.

A diagram showing a meeting transcript moving from live capture through storage, permissioned access and eventual deletion or retained storage. AI processing retention pol… permissioned… deletion job 1 Call happens audio captured live in br… 2 Transcribed text generated during the… 3 Stored as record kept per workspace retent… 4 Accessed searched, reviewed, pulle… 5 Retention ends deleted and logged, or ex…
The path a transcript takes from a live call to a record someone can be asked to produce

The transcript is a record now

Once a call is transcribed, that transcript becomes a written record of the conversation, and it inherits whatever rules already apply to written records of that kind. A clinical intake call touches HIPAA the moment it's captured as PHI. A broker-dealer's client call sits inside SEC and FINRA recordkeeping rules that specify retention windows measured in years, not a company's internal habits. A privileged legal conversation carries work-product exposure the second it's searchable text sitting in a third party's system.

None of that is about the note-taking tool being good or bad. It's about the fact that a transcript, unlike a fading memory of the call, is discoverable, exportable and permanent until someone deliberately makes it not permanent.

Vendor compliance answers a different question

A SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certificate describes the vendor's own internal controls — how they patch servers, who can access their production systems, how they handle a breach. It says nothing about your deployment: which workspace setting you left on default, whether anyone signed a BAA for this specific data category, or how long your team configured transcripts to be kept.

'The vendor is compliant' is a true statement that does not answer 'is this deployment compliant,' the same way a fire-rated door doesn't make a building code-compliant if it's propped open. An auditor asking about your meeting transcription setup wants the second answer, and it lives in your contracts and your admin settings, not in the vendor's trust page.

Residency, retention and deletion are three separate questions

Regulated teams get these three tangled together in vendor conversations, and an auditor will pull them apart one at a time.

What AVAY does today

AVAY runs meetings in the browser and transcribes the call itself as it happens, rather than dialing a bot into someone else's platform. The recording of the call, when one is made, is saved to the device that made it — it isn't kept in AVAY's cloud by default, which is different from the transcript and notes, which AVAY does retain so the content is searchable later.

Files shared during a call are live-only: someone reviewing the transcript afterward sees that a document was discussed, not the document itself. Connectors that reach a team's own systems — a CRM, a ticketing tool — are attached by the team, not switched on by AVAY, which means what regulated data flows into a meeting is a decision your admins make, not a default you inherit.

Where it doesn't fit

If a regulator or an internal audit requires that meeting audio and transcripts never leave infrastructure the firm itself controls — common in bank back-office functions and in some hospital systems handling clinical calls — AVAY has no self-hosted or on-premise option today. That's a rule-out, not a configuration question: no workspace setting changes where the underlying service actually runs.

Teams under that specific requirement need a self-hosted transcription pipeline, and the honest move is to say so during procurement rather than try to configure around a hard architectural limit.

What to ask before you sign

A short list gets more out of a vendor call than a general question about compliance.

Data residency controlWho is the processorFits a self-hosted/on-prem requirement
Third-party bot joining the callSet by the bot vendor's infrastructure, not yoursThe bot vendor, for whatever it capturesNo — audio still leaves your environment
In-meeting AI, AVAY's modelHosted; transcript stored by AVAY, recording stays localAVAY, as processor of the meeting contentNo — no self-hosted option today
Self-hosted transcription pipelineEntirely within firm-controlled infrastructureYour organization remains processor and controllerYes — the only model that satisfies this requirement
How deployment model affects what you can tell an auditor
  1. 1 Scope the request The auditor names the calls, date range and data category — PHI, trade communications, privileged advice — they want accounted for.
  2. 2 Map who processes what You produce the vendor's role as processor, the signed DPA or BAA, and the subprocessor list, not just a badge.
  3. 3 Show the retention schedule You demonstrate what's actually configured — how long transcripts are kept, and for which team or workspace.
  4. 4 Prove deletion happened You produce a deletion log or export, not a statement that the data was removed.
The sequence a records request from an auditor actually follows

Common questions

Is AVAY HIPAA compliant?

Whether a deployment is HIPAA compliant depends on a signed BAA, workspace-level retention settings and who actually has access — not on the software alone. Check directly with AVAY about a BAA before using it for calls that touch PHI; a vendor's certifications don't answer that question for your specific deployment.

Does AVAY keep recordings in the cloud?

No, not by default. The recording itself is saved to the device that made it rather than stored in AVAY's cloud, which is different from the transcript and notes, which AVAY does retain so you can search and reference them later.

Can we run AVAY on our own servers for a regulated deployment?

Not currently. AVAY runs as a hosted service with no self-hosted or on-premise option, so if your audit or regulator requires meeting data to stay entirely on firm-controlled infrastructure, AVAY is ruled out for that use case today.

Who is the data processor when we use AVAY for client or patient calls?

Your organization is the controller of the conversation; AVAY processes the meeting content — audio, transcript, notes — as a processor acting on your instructions. That split needs to be written into a DPA, and a BAA if PHI is involved, rather than assumed from a features page.

What happens to a transcript when a case closes or an employee leaves?

That's governed by your workspace's retention setting, not a fixed rule baked into the software. A regulated team should configure retention deliberately and confirm deletion is actually logged, since 'we deleted it' without a log is not something an auditor can verify.

The short version

A transcript is a record the moment it's made — treat the vendor's own compliance attestations as one input, not the whole answer, and get residency, retention, deletion and processor terms in writing before regulated conversations go through it.

Read next

Try it on your next call

AVAY is a video meeting platform that transcribes the call itself — no bot joins, because there is nothing to join. Start one at avay.ai, read how each part works in the documentation, or see what it costs.