Meeting transcription software: No bot, for meetings, workshops and conferences

Tab audio or microphone? Zoom, Teams and Meet

To transcribe live meeting audio to text, the source depends on where the meeting runs:

Tab audio hears the others, not your own microphone. If your own words must be in the text, use the meeting’s recording afterwards.

Is the platform’s own transcript enough?

Meeting platforms offer their own transcripts. If your plan and language fit, that is the shortest way.

These come from the makers’ help pages (November 2026) and may change. Such transcripts usually live in the organizer’s account on the platform’s servers. If you are not the organizer, or want the transcript in your own hands, the routes below fit better.

Transcribing a recorded meeting

If you have a Zoom, Teams or Meet recording, choose it as a sound or video file. MP4 and M4A open directly, and in the background mode you need not watch it. To skip the small talk, use Choose a range to take only the agenda. If you noted the time of key moments, taking timecodes helps you find the range.

Who said what

Speaker separation is on by default. When a new voice is heard a numbered label appears; click it and type the name, and all of that person’s paragraphs change. If one person shows up under two numbers, give both the same name and they merge. See speaker names.

This is where editing during a meeting helps most: Fix a name the first time it appears and the rest reads easily. In a transcript shared with your team, one person can follow the talk while another corrects the same text.

From transcript to meeting notes

If you are looking for meeting transcription AI that takes notes for you, know this: LiveType gives you the text, not a summary or a task list. You write the notes from it. Keep paragraph times in your notes so you can return to the moment if a decision is questioned:

If you give the text to a note-taking AI, remove personal details first and compare the result with the text: Such tools can also write a decision nobody made.

Transcribing workshop discussions

The challenge in a workshop is order, not sound: Scattered tables, many speakers, voices overlapping. A setup for a workshop with several tables:

A few rules make it easier:

• Ask people to say their name when they take the floor.
• Work through recordings in turn. An account transcribes one thing at a time, so give the table recordings one by one after the session.
• Fill in overlaps by ear. The model may drop one of the voices.
• Write the report from the transcript, do not paste it. Gather main views and decisions per session and mark quotes with their times.

Conference talks and Q&A

A speaker has a microphone and usually clean sound. The person asking a question often does not.

1. Take sound from the right place. The room’s system or a device close to the speaker is best. If there is a live stream, you can transcribe that instead.
2. Keep the Q&A understandable. Ask the chair to pass the microphone or repeat each question.
3. Keep names and terms at hand. The slides help here, since names are where most mistakes appear.
4. Rewrite it yourself for a full paper. Spoken language is not written language; the transcript is raw material.

Writing the paper and preparing the talk are outside this page. Do not publish a talk without the speaker’s permission.

Getting consent

Say it before you start recording and get agreement on the recording. A sentence like this may be enough: “I am recording this meeting and transcribing it. I will use the text only for the notes. Does anyone object?” Secret recording can be an offence in many places and falls under data protection rules. For Turkey, see KVKK and voice recordings.

What this does not do

LiveType does not connect to your calendar, join a meeting on its own, write task lists or store the sound on the server. Without tab audio it cannot hear an online meeting. Overlapping speech weakens the text. To compare tools, see Wave and VoiceDocs. The free plan has 30 minutes in total; for long meetings see the plans.