How to Transcribe a Google Meet Recording

The first thing to know about Google Meet is that most meetings are not recorded at all. Recording is a feature of certain Workspace plans, and on a personal Google account there is usually no record button and therefore nothing to transcribe afterwards.

If the meeting was recorded

Recordings go to Google Drive, in a Meet Recordings folder belonging to whoever started the recording, and an email with the link arrives when processing finishes. A long meeting can take a while to appear — the recording is not ready the moment the call ends.

1. Open Drive and find Meet Recordings, or use the link from the email.
2. Open the recording and choose Download.
3. You get an MP4.

Meet can also produce its own transcript on plans that include it, saved to Drive alongside the recording as a document. Like every built-in transcript it is a fixed record — useful, but not something you correct and carry onward.

Turning it into a transcript

1. Open video to text and drop in the downloaded MP4.
2. Wait — only the audio track is read, so the video's resolution changes nothing.
3. Fix names and terms against the audio.
4. Export: plain text or Markdown for notes, SRT or VTT for captions, CSV for a sheet.

When there is no recording

This is the common case, and it is worth being blunt: if nobody recorded the meeting, there is nothing to transcribe. No tool can recover a call that was not captured. The options are to record the next one, or — if you are in the meeting and need a record of it — to record your own audio locally and transcribe that.

If you are recording your own audio, our record and transcribe page does both in one step, and the resulting transcript behaves like any other: editable, searchable, exportable.