Audio

How to transcribe a meeting or interview

An audio file is something you have to scrub through. A transcript is something you can search.

AI Transcription separates the speakers, attaches timestamps and gives you a document — which makes pulling a quote, finding the moment a decision was made, or producing subtitles almost free.

When to use this

  • You need a written record of a call, interview, podcast or lecture.
  • You want to quote someone accurately rather than from memory.
  • A video needs subtitles and you have the audio already.

Get the recording right

  1. Record per speaker where you can

    A remote call recorded with separate speaker tracks transcribes close to perfectly. Several people around one laptop with an air conditioner running will produce errors, especially on names and overlapping speech.

  2. Upload the audio or video

    Open AI Transcription and add the file. Common audio and video formats are accepted, so a screen recording works as well as an audio file.

  3. Set the language

    Name the spoken language rather than leaving it to be guessed, particularly for accented speech or anything with technical vocabulary.

Work with the transcript

  1. Fix the speaker labels

    Rename the detected speakers once and the whole transcript updates. Do this before you share it with anyone.

  2. Jump to the audio from any line

    Timestamps link back to the recording, so you can confirm a disputed passage in seconds instead of scrubbing.

  3. Review anything you intend to quote

    Budget a few minutes to check names, numbers and technical terms before a quote goes anywhere public.

  4. Search across your recordings

    Once processed, every transcript is searchable, so "when did we agree on the launch date" becomes a text search rather than an archaeology project.

Turn it into the output you needed

  1. Summarise and pull action items

    Generate a summary, the decisions and the action items from the transcript instead of writing notes during the call.

  2. Export subtitles

    Export a subtitle file for the video the audio came from, or send it on for styled captions.

  3. Reuse the content

    An interview transcript is the raw material for a blog post, a set of quotes and a handful of social clips.