Turn Zoom and Teams recordings into readable notes without uploading them anywhere. Honest guidance on long files, accuracy, and the note-taking workflow.
Files are processed locally and never uploaded.
Download your meeting's audio file (Zoom's audio-only .m4a recording is ideal) and drop it into the uploader above.
Choose the base tier for the best balance, or small for maximum accuracy if your machine is up to it — then let it process.
Copy the transcript into your doc, add speaker names and action items as you review, and download the TXT for your records.
Zoom makes this easy: enable audio-only recording and you get a compact .m4a file per meeting, ready to transcribe as-is. Teams is trickier — it records video (.mp4), and this tool is built for audio files, so grab the audio-only track or use a local recording instead of the cloud video. Either way, start from the actual recording file rather than re-recording playback through your mic; every generation of re-recording costs accuracy.
One habit pays for itself: download the recording to your machine first. Transcribing from a local file is faster and more reliable than streaming, and it means the sensitive content of your meeting never passes through anything but your own browser.
Here's what most transcription tools won't tell you: browser-based Whisper decodes the entire audio file into memory and processes it on your CPU, so an hour-long meeting is genuinely heavy work. Expect minutes of processing for tens of minutes of audio — longer on older machines — and keep the tab open and your laptop awake while it runs. This isn't a limitation of the tool so much as physics: accurate speech recognition takes compute.
Two practical moves help. First, split marathon recordings into 30–60 minute segments; shorter files process more smoothly and a failure costs you one segment, not the whole meeting. Second, use the base tier rather than small for routine meetings — the accuracy difference on clear conference audio is small, and base finishes noticeably faster.
The transcript is the raw material, not the notes. The workflow that works: transcribe, paste the text into your meeting doc, then do one review pass adding what the tool can't — speaker names (there are no speaker labels in the output), decisions, and action items with owners. That single pass takes ten minutes and produces notes people actually read, versus a raw transcript nobody opens.
Resist the temptation to skip the review. Whisper is excellent but it won't catch that "Q3" was actually "Q4" in a mumbly aside, and it has no idea which voice belongs to whom. The transcript gives you 90% of the value — the capture — and your review supplies the 10% that makes it trustworthy.
Meeting audio is transcription's obstacle course: crosstalk, laptop fans, people talking over each other, someone presenting from a kitchen. Set the language explicitly instead of auto-detect — meetings are long enough that detection usually works, but explicit is strictly more reliable. If the recording has a consistent problem (one remote participant is always quiet), that participant's sections will simply be weaker; no setting fixes a bad source.
The single biggest upgrade is free: whoever records should use Zoom's audio-only recording or a decent microphone rather than a laptop mic across the room. And brief the team once — "the meeting is being transcribed, please don't all talk at once" — which improves both the transcript and the meeting.
Board discussions, HR conversations, unreleased strategy — the meetings most worth transcribing are the ones you'd least want uploaded to a transcription service. Local processing resolves the tension completely: the audio is decoded and transcribed by your own device, with no account, no server, and no retention policy to read. Verify it with your browser's network inspector if you're the cautious type.
One responsibility stays with you: the TXT file you download is now a sensitive document. Store it where your meeting notes live, with the same access controls — the tool kept the audio private in transit, but the transcript's afterlife is your workflow's job.
It depends on your machine — expect minutes to tens of minutes on the base tier, longer on small. Keep the tab open and the computer awake while it processes. Splitting long recordings into 30–60 minute segments makes processing smoother and limits what a hiccup can cost you.
No — the output is plain running text with no speaker diarization and no timestamps. For meeting notes, do one review pass adding speaker names, decisions, and action items; that pass is what turns a transcript into notes people actually use.
This tool is built for audio files (MP3, WAV, M4A). For Teams, use an audio-only recording or extract the audio track first rather than uploading the video file. Zoom's audio-only .m4a recordings work directly with no conversion.
Yes — there's a built-in mic recording button. But transcribing the actual meeting recording file is always better quality than re-recording playback through a microphone. Use direct recording only for quick captures, not as a substitute for the real file.