Transcription is live again: 60 free minutes a month, Pro is $19/mo. Other tools are coming back. Students: lecture notes still live at VocalScribe.
Transcribe a Zoom recording by uploading the audio_only.m4a file from your Zoom folder to Kai The Scribe, ticking Label different speakers, and clicking Start Transcription. Zoom saves every local recording as both an MP4 and a smaller M4A, and the M4A is the better file because it is a fraction of the size. Uploads are capped at 4 MB, so for a meeting longer than a few minutes, paste a direct public link to the M4A under Media URL.
A Zoom recording is the most common file people bring to the tool after podcasts. A Zoom recording is also the easiest to get wrong, because Zoom hands you three different things: a share link, an MP4, and an M4A. Only the files work. The steps below show which one to pick and where Zoom put it.
Zoom stores recordings in one of two places depending on how the meeting was recorded.
The share link Zoom emails after a cloud recording opens a playback page with a passcode. That page is not a media file, so pasting it into the tool returns an error. Download the file first.
There are five steps. Each label below matches the tool.
The output is one block of punctuated plain text. A 60 minute meeting with three people produces roughly 8,000 to 9,500 words. The summary card shows the duration, the detected language, and the file name, so you can confirm it was the right recording. Copy puts the whole transcript on your clipboard. Download .txt saves it as audio_only.txt, or as the name of whatever file you uploaded.
Speaker names are the gap to plan for. With Label different speakers ticked, each turn starts with Speaker 1:, Speaker 2: and so on, but the tool does not know who is who. Read the first few turns to match numbers to people, then use find and replace to put the names in.
Zoom generates a transcript for cloud recordings on paid plans when the audio transcript setting is on. Zoom's transcript is a VTT file with rough speaker turns and no punctuation cleanup. It does not exist for local recordings or free accounts, which is where most personal and small team meetings live. The tool here works on any Zoom file, gives punctuated text, and downloads as .txt. Use Zoom's transcript when you need speaker turns and have it. Use this when you need readable text or have a local recording.
Meeting notes come out of the transcript in three searches. Search for "action" and "will" to find commitments. Search for "decide" and "agree" to find decisions. Search for question marks to find open items. Paste those lines under three headings, add the owner's name, and send. Ten minutes of work replaces an hour of re-watching.
A local recording lands in a Zoom folder inside Documents, in a subfolder named with the meeting date and topic. It holds an MP4 video and an audio_only.m4a file. A cloud recording is on the Recordings page of your Zoom web account, where each file has a Download button.
No. A Zoom share link opens a playback page with a passcode, not a media file, so the tool cannot fetch it. Download the recording from the Recordings page first, then upload the file.
Yes, as numbered speakers. Tick Label different speakers and each turn starts with Speaker 1:, Speaker 2: and so on. Replace the numbers with names using find and replace.
Use the audio_only.m4a rather than the MP4, and paste a direct public link to it under Media URL; uploads are capped at 4 MB. Processing is capped at 60 seconds per request, so split a very long meeting into two halves.
Every account gets 60 free minutes a month, enough for one hour-long meeting. Pro is $19 a month for teams that record weekly. Minutes count the length of the recording.